Naval defense was taken up systematically in Great Britain in the eighth century by King Offa, to whom is credited the maxim, “He who would be secure on land must be supreme at sea”; but it must have dropped to a low ebb by 1066, for William of Normandy landed in England unopposed.  Since that time Great Britain’s naval defense, committed to her navy, has increased steadily in effectiveness and power, keeping pace with the increase in the national interests it defended, and utilizing all the growing resources of wealth and science which the world afforded.  Until the present crisis, Great Britain’s naval defense did its most important work during Napoleon’s time, when Great Britain’s standing, like the standing of every other European nation, was subjected to a strain that it could hardly bear.  So keenly, however, did the nation and the nation’s great leader, Pitt, realize the situation that the most strenuous measures were adopted to keep the navy up, press-gangs even visiting the houses of subjects of the King, taking men out and putting them by force on board his Majesty’s ships.  But the British navy, even more than the British army, brought Great Britain safe out of the Napoleonic danger, and made the British the paramount nation of the world.

Since then Great Britain has waxed more and more powerful, her avowed policy being that her navy should be equal to any other two; realizing that her aloofness in point of national characteristics and policy from all other nations made it possible that a coalition of at least two great nations might be pitted against her at a time when she could not get an ally.  Accompanying the growth of the British navy has been the establishment of British foreign trade, British colonies, and British bases from which the navy could work, and the general making of a network of British commerce and British power over the surface of the earth.  No other nation has ever dominated so large a part of the surface of the globe as has Great Britain during the last two centuries; and she has done it by means of her naval power.  This naval power has been, in the language of Great Britain, for the “imperial defense”; not for coast defense alone, but for the defense of all the imperial interests, commercial and political, and even the imperial prestige.  And this defense of prestige, it may here be remarked, is not a vainglorious defense, not an exhibition of a swaggering, swashbuckling spirit, but a recognition of the fact that the minds of men are so constituted that the prestige of an individual, an organization, or a nation has a practical value and is an actual force.  No government that appreciates its responsibilities will willingly risk the prestige of the nation which it governs, because it knows that any weakening of it will be followed by a weakening of influence and a consequent increase of difficulty in attaining some “end in view.”