The year, too, has witnessed a new form of the spread-eagle tendency in the revival of one of our periodical scares about the strength of the navy. About once in every ten or twenty years a knot of shipbuilders, journalists, seamen, and gunners, contrive to stir up a panic, and to force the nation into a great increase of its military expenditure. I am not going to discuss the truth about the Navy, or whether it be equal or not to the requirements of the Service. I look at this in a new way: I take up very different ground. I say that the service, to which we are now called on to make the navy equal, is a service that we ought not to undertake. The requirements demanded are wholly incompatible with the true interests of our nation. They are opposed to the real conditions of civilisation. They will be in a very few years, even if they are not now, beyond the power of this people to meet. The claim to a maritime supremacy, in the sense that this country is permanently to remain undisputed mistress of all seas, always able and ready to overwhelm any possible combination of any foreign Powers, this claim in itself is a ridiculous anachronism. Whether the British fleet is now able to overpower the combined fleets of Europe, or even of several Powers in Europe, I do not know. Even if it be now able, such is the progress of events, the ambition of our neighbors, and the actual conditions of modern war, that it is physically impossible that such a supremacy can be permanently maintained. To maintain it, even for another generation, would involve the subjection of England to a military tyranny such as exists for the moment in Germany, to a crushing taxation and conscription, of which we have had no experience. We should have to spend, not twenty-five, but fifty millions a year on our army and navy if we intend to be really masters in every sea, and to make the entire British empire one continuous Malta and Gibraltar. And even that, or a hundred millions a year, would not suffice in the future for the inevitable growth of foreign powers and the constant growth of our own empire. To guarantee the permanent supremacy of the seas, we shall need some Bismarck to crush our free people into the vice of his military autocracy and universal conscription.