in naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land, draws to its close.  The progress of invention makes both the big ship and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective.  A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes.  Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those massivenesses.  We are entering upon a period in which the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be more rapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question of what we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to meet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance.  Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indolence of my countrymen, it is a question I face with something very near to dismay.

But it is one that has to be faced.  The question that should occupy our directing minds now is no longer “How can we get more Dreadnoughts?” but “What have we to follow the Dreadnought?”

To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle belongs the future Empire of the Seas.  It is interesting to guess for oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing.  I am not guessing, but asking urgent questions.  What force, what council, how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at the present time employed not casually but professionally in anticipating the new strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new training that invention is so rapidly rendering necessary?  I have the gravest doubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way.

Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I want to call attention.  Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerous and vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships.  She is short of minds.  Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, a strength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very moment it comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounder strength of intellectual and creative activity.

This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the production of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise the folly of its trust in established things.  Each new thing we take up more belatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor.  The time is not far distant when we shall be “caught” lagging unless we change all this.

We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall need it more and more, and that arm is Research.  We need to place inquiry and experiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them and organise them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicists and engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon the anticipation and preparation of our future war equipment.  We need a service of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters.