The immediate effects of naval victory can hardly ever again be so far-reaching as they were a century ago in the epoch of masts and sails.  At that time there were no foreign navies, except in European waters, and in the Atlantic waters of the United States.  When, therefore, the British navy had crushed its European adversaries, its ships could act without serious opposition upon any sea and any coast in the world.  To-day, the radius of action of a victorious fleet is restricted by the necessity of a supply of coal, and therefore by the secure possession of coaling-stations at suitable intervals along any route by which the fleet proposes to move, or by the goodwill of neutrals in permitting it to coal at their depots.  To-day, moreover, there are navies established even in distant seas.  In the Pacific, for example, are the fleets of Japan and of the United States, and these, in their home waters, will probably be too strong to be opposed by European navies acting at a vast distance from their bases.

It seems likely, therefore, that neither Great Britain nor any other State will in future enjoy that monopoly of sea power which was granted to Great Britain by the circumstances of her victories in the last great war.  What I have called the great prize has in fact ceased to exist, and even if an adversary were to challenge the British navy, the reward of his success would not be a naval supremacy of anything like the kind or extent which peculiar conditions made it possible for Great Britain to enjoy during the nineteenth century.  It would be a supremacy limited and reduced by the existence of the new navies that have sprung up.

From these considerations a very important conclusion must be drawn.  In the first place, enough victory at sea is in case of war as indispensable to Great Britain as ever, for it remains the fundamental condition of her security, yet its results can hardly in future be as great as they were in the past, and in particular it may perhaps not again enable her to exert upon continental States the same effective pressure which it formerly rendered possible.

In order, therefore, to bring pressure upon a continental adversary, Great Britain is more than ever in need of the co-operation of a continental ally.  A navy alone cannot produce the effect which it once did upon the course of a land war, and its success will not suffice to give confidence to the ally.  Nothing but an army able to take its part in a continental struggle will, in modern conditions, suffice to make Great Britain the effective ally of a continental State, and in the absence of such an army Great Britain will continue to be, as she is to-day, without continental allies.

A second conclusion is that our people, while straining every nerve in peace to ensure to their navy the best chances of victory in war, must carefully avoid the conception of a dominion of the sea, although, in fact, such a dominion actually existed during a great part of the nineteenth century.  The new conditions which have grown up during the past thirty years have made this ideal as much a thing of the past as the mediaeval conception of a Roman Empire in Europe to whose titular head all kings were subordinate.