Now this is really a very striking admission. Whence arose this theory that naval warfare consisted of unfathomable mysteries? Perhaps the explanation is as follows: Popular interest in the navy was first thoroughly aroused by Mr. Stead’s _Pall Mall_ articles in the middle eighties. It is from the controversies that he aroused that Brassey’s and the other annual naval publications emerged. For twenty years newspaper interest in shipbuilding programmes, design, and so forth, advanced in a crescendo of intensity. The many and startling departures in naval policy that characterized Lord Fisher’s tenure of the first professional place on the Board of Admiralty, brought this interest to a climax. There was a controversial demand for more costly programmes involving political and journalistic opposition, which in turn provoked greater vigour in those that advocated them. Thus the whole of naval policy had to be commended to popular--and civilian--judgment. And it followed that the advocates of expansion had to employ arguments that civilians could understand. They very soon perceived that success lay along the line of sensationalism. Larger and faster ships, heavier and longer range guns carrying bigger and more devastating shells, faster and more terrifying torpedoes, those new craft of weird mystery, the submarines--all these things in turn and for considerable periods were urged upon the public and the statesmen in terms of awe and wonder. But the Augurs, instead of winking behind the veil, came finally to be hypnotized by their own wonder talk. Who cannot remember that ever-recurring phrase, “the untold possibilities” of the new engines of war? They got to be so convinced on this subject that they made no effort to find out precisely what the possibilities were, and Mr. Churchill’s phrase that I have just quoted, “the strange new, unmeasured, and largely immeasurable conditions,” exactly summed up the frame of mind of those who were responsible for naval policy up to and including Mr. Churchill’s time. If all these problems were insoluble, if the conditions were immeasurable, if the possibilities of new weapons were really untold and untellable, what was the use of worrying about experiment and knowledge, judgment and _expertize_? It was this frame of mind that led a humorist to suggest that the materialists ought really to be called the spiritualists.