Then other things will happen.

The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our capital ships.  Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much stronger in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes.  These are things cheap to make and easy to conceal.  He will be richly stocked with ingenious devices for getting explosives up to these two million pound triumphs of our naval engineering.  On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about these islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later, unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these chances will come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought.

It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and capitulating.  It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water.  Our Dreadnoughts will cease to be a source of unmitigated confidence A second battleship disaster will excite the Press extremely.  A third will probably lead to a retirement of the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a refuge liable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland—­and the real naval war, which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a war of destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin.  Incidentally a commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet to raid our trade routes.

We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smaller weapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and the waterplane—­the waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities of a comparative bigness—­in the hands of competent and daring men.  And I find myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubts whether we are as certainly superior to any possible adversary in these essential things as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts.  I find myself awake at nights, after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press, wondering whether the real Empire of the Sea may not even now have slipped out of our hands while our attention has been fixed on our stately procession of giant warships, while our country has been in a dream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought idea.

For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British imagination in naval and military matters.  That declining faculty, never a very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good.  Its reply to every demand upon it has been “more Dreadnoughts.”  The future, as we British seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts and Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of inverted perspective.  But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships