The First Lord of the Admiralty, in reply to a question asked in the House of Parliament in 1900, had replied "that the Admiralty had _not_ designed a submarine boat, and did not propose to design one, because such a boat would be the weapon of an inferior power". Whether he was right or wrong, the statement was a straightforward and an understandable one. Possibly it struck the First Lord as being too straightforward for a politician, so he at once began to "hedge", and qualified what he had said by adding: "But if it could be produced as a working article, the Power which possessed such an article would no longer be an inferior but a superior Power". It is hard to reconcile the two statements; for if a submarine was an unworkable proposition it would be no good to any Power, strong or weak. However, a couple of years later, as I have already mentioned, the Admiralty determined to acquire a few submarine boats, nominally with the view of finding out how their use by an enemy could be rendered abortive. First one and then four other practically similar ones, to be built on Holland's designs, were ordered from Vickers of Barrow-in-Furness. Their displacement--submerged--was 120 tons. It must be remembered that a submarine's surface displacement is always less than when she has filled her tanks to sink her deeper in the water. They were 63 feet 4 inches long and 11 feet 9 inches wide at their greatest beam; steamed from 8 to 10 knots above and 5 to 7 knots below water, carried a crew of seven men, and had a single torpedo-tube. Many experiments were carried out with these little vessels, the net result being that series after series of larger and larger submarines were constructed, each batch an improvement on the preceding one. Thus we had, after the first five "Hollands", the A, B, C, D, and E classes, and are now turning out the "F" class. The description of our latest submarines must be postponed till the chapter dealing with the fighting-ships of to-day; but it may be noted that up to 1914 all had been improved "Hollands". That is to say, that while some other naval powers, notably Germany, were building their submarines more and more on the lines of surface vessels with flat tops or decks, we remained faithful to the "porpoise" or "fat cigar" type, only modifying them by increasing their size and length, and by adding to the length of the narrow superstructure, which formed a deck and eventually a cut-water for use at the surface, but which was independent of the actual watertight hull or body of the vessel, since the water was allowed free access below the platform. * * * * *