It is therefore unlikely that there underlay this re-creation of the navy—­for such in truth it was—­any more recondite cause than the urgent necessity of possessing tools wholly fit for the work which war-ships are called upon to do.  The thing had to be done, if the national fleet was to be other than an impotent parody of naval force, a costly effigy of straw.  But, concurrently with the process of rebuilding, there has been concentrated upon the development of the new service a degree of attention, greater than can be attributed even to the voracious curiosity of this age of newsmongering and of interviewers.  This attention in some quarters is undisguisedly reluctant and hostile, in others not only friendly but expectant, in both cases betraying a latent impression that there is, between the appearance of the new-comer and the era upon which we now are entering, something in common.  If such coincidence there be, however, it is indicative not of a deliberate purpose, but of a commencing change of conditions, economical and political, throughout the world, with which sea power, in the broad sense of the phrase, will be associated closely; not, indeed, as the cause, nor even chiefly as a result, but rather as the leading characteristic of activities which shall cease to be mainly internal, and shall occupy themselves with the wider interests that concern the relations of states to the world at large.  And it is just at this point that the opposing lines of feeling divide.  Those who hold that our political interests are confined to matters within our own borders, and are unwilling to admit that circumstances may compel us in the future to political action without them, look with dislike and suspicion upon the growth of a body whose very existence indicates that nations have international duties as well as international rights, and that international complications will arise from which we can no more escape than the states which have preceded us in history, or those contemporary with us.  Others, on the contrary, regarding the conditions and signs of these times, and the extra-territorial activities in which foreign states have embarked so restlessly and widely, feel that the nation, however greatly against its wish, may become involved in controversies not unlike those which in the middle of the century caused very serious friction, but which the generation that saw the century open would have thought too remote for its concern, and certainly wholly beyond its power to influence.

Religious creeds, dealing with eternal verities, may be susceptible of a certain permanency of statement; yet even here we in this day have witnessed the embarrassments of some religious bodies, arising from a traditional adherence to merely human formulas, which reflect views of the truth as it appeared to the men who framed them in the distant past.  But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away