as a whole the power of resisting disturbance without at the same time reducing their power of exercising control.  The accepted solution of the difficulty during the great period of Anson’s school was to provide them with a covering force of battle units specially adapted for fighting.  But here arises a correlative difficulty.  In so far as we give our battle units fighting power we deny them scouting power, and scouting is essential to their effective operation.  The battle-fleet must have eyes.  Now, vessels adapted for control of communications are also well adapted for “eyes.”  It becomes the practice, therefore, to withdraw from control operations a sufficient number of units to enable the battle-fleet to cover effectively the operations of those that remain.

Such were the broad principles on which the inevitable dilemma always had to be solved, and on which Anson’s organisation was based.  They flow naturally from the communication theory of maritime war, and it was this theory which then dominated naval thought, as is apparent from the technical use of such phrases as “lines of passage and communication.”  The war plans of the great strategists from Anson and Barham can always be resolved into these simple elements, and where we find the Admiralty grip of them loosened, we have the confusion and quite unnecessary failures of the War of American Independence.  In that mismanaged contest the cardinal mistake was that we suffered the enemy’s battle-fleets to get upon and occupy the vital lines of “passage and communication” without first bringing them to action, an error partly due to the unreadiness of a weak administration, and partly to an insufficient allocation of cruisers to secure contact at the right places.

So far, then, the principles on which our naval supremacy was built up are clear.  For the enemies with whom we had to deal Anson’s system was admirably conceived.  Both Spain and France held the communication theory so strongly, that they were content to count as success the power of continually disturbing our control without any real attempt to secure it for themselves.  To defeat such a policy Anson’s constitution and the strategy it connoted were thoroughly well adapted and easy to work.  But it by no means follows that his doctrine is the last word.  Even in his own time complications had begun to develop which tended to confuse the precision of his system.  By the culminating year of Trafalgar there were indications that it was getting worn out, while the new methods and material used by the Americans in 1812 made a serious rent in it.  The disturbances then inaugurated have continued to develop, and it is necessary to consider how seriously they have confused the problem of fleet constitution.