choice but to turn his whole fleet together, a dangerous and desperate manœuvre, but permissible because the time would have come for a _sauve qui peut_. But while these considerations may have caused him some anxiety, there were other elements to reassure him. Years before the war, the Germans had discovered and grasped what seemed the fundamental strategic idea that had shaped British naval strategy. It was that the rôle of our main sea forces in war was to be primarily defensive. Our fleet was to consist of units individually more powerful than those of competing navies. As to numbers, we were aiming at possessing these on an equality with the two next largest Powers combined. It was a policy that permitted of an overwhelming concentration against the most powerful of our competitors, the Germans, while still maintaining substantial forces the world over. It was a presumption of this policy that the use of the sea would in war be ceded to us by our enemies, and would remain virtually undisturbed until our main forces were not only attacked but defeated. Numbers and individual power made an attack by inferior forces seem the most remote of all contingencies, and defeat impossible. From this theory the Germans derived a corollary. It was that, as the British ideal was concerned not primarily with victory, but in avoiding defeat, we should probably not face great risks to destroy an enemy--and obviously no enemy could be destroyed without great risks--but rather would be chiefly preoccupied with averting the destruction, not only of our whole fleet, but even of such a proportion of it as would deprive us of that pre-eminence in numbers on which we seemed chiefly to rely. Hence, in the preamble of the last Navy Bill which the Government got the Reichstag to accept before the war, it was plainly stated that the naval policy of the German Higher Command did not aim at possessing a fleet capable of defeating the strongest fleet in the world, but would be satisfied with a force that the strongest fleet could not defeat, except at a cost that would bring it so low that its world supremacy would be gone. The underlying military conception was that the group then controlling the British Navy would not fight, and the underlying political conception that, should this group be replaced by leaders of a more aggressive complexion, the price we should pay for a sea victory would be a combination of the world’s other sea forces against us, they being prompted to this by their long-felt jealousy of Great Britain’s navalism.