In war the moral is far greater than the material, the psychological than the mechanical. One cannot begin to understand the simplest of actions unless one knows something of the spirit of the men who fight them. In sea battles, more than in contests upon land, events revolve round the personalities of the leaders and results depend upon the skill with which these leaders have gauged the problem set them, and dispose their forces to meet those varying phases which lead up to a conclusion. It is borne in upon us by hard experience that the southern part of the North Sea is not big enough and not deep enough to afford space for a first-class naval battle to be fought out to the finish. The enemy is too near his home bases, he can break off an action and get away before being overwhelmed. Yet even in the southern North Sea there is room in which to dispose great naval forces and in which to manœuvre them. Fleets are not tucked up by space as are modern armies. Jutland was a battle of encounter and manœuvre, not of heavy destructive fighting. There was a dainty deftness about the first two phases which is eminently pleasing to our national sea pride, and however we may growl at the tactical incompleteness of the battle we cannot but admit that, taken as a whole, it was as strategically decisive an action as has ever been fought by the English Navy throughout its long history. It re-established the old doctrine, which the course of the Sea War has tended to thrust out of sight, that Command of the Sea rests as completely as it always has done in the past upon the big fighting ships of the main battle line. Upon them everything else depends; the operations of destroyers and light cruisers, of patrols and even of submarines. For upon big ships depends the security of home bases. Surface ships alone can occupy the wide spaces of the sea and can hold securely the ports in one’s own country and the ports which are ravished from an enemy. Submarines are essentially raiders, their office is the obstruction of sea communications, but submarines are useless, even for their special work of obstruction, unless they can retire, refit, and replenish stores at bases made secure by the existence in effective being of a strong force of big fighting ships. Had Jutland been as great a tactical success as it was a strategical success, had it ended with the wiping out of the German High Seas Fleet, then, as I have already stated, the U-boat menace would have been scotched by the destruction of the protecting screen behind which the U-boats are built, refitted, and replenished. No small part of the German relief at the issue of Jutland is due to their realisation of this naval truth. They express that realisation in a sentence which contains the whole doctrine of the efficacy of the big ship as the final determinant in naval warfare. Admiral Scheer in his dispatch declared that the Battle of May 31st,