one hand, therefore, I was subjected to this ever-growing naval pressure, and on the other to a solid wall of resistance to expense. In the midst of all lay the existence of our naval power. I had thus to fight all the year on two fronts: on one to repulse the excessive and, as I thought, extravagant demands of the Royal Commission and of my naval advisers, and on the other to wrest the necessary supplies from the Treasury and the Cabinet. I had to be very careful that arguments intended for one front did not become known to my antagonists on the other. I wrote to Lord Fisher that to prescribe a four years standard of reserves would be the death-blow to the oil policy of which he was the champion. I was forced to enter into arguments of extreme technical detail with the Second Sea Lord and the War Staff both as to the probable consumption per month of oil in the opening phases of a naval war, and secondly upon the number of months’ supply that should be in the country in each individual month. I had extreme difficulties with the Board of Admiralty in regard to the reductions which I thought necessary in both scales, and I feared for some time that I should lose the services of the Second Sea Lord. This, however, was happily averted and we finally agreed upon reduced scales which were in the end accepted by all concerned. These conclusions stood the test of war. The reduced scales estimated a total consumption in the first ten months of war of 1,000,000 tons. The actual consumption was 800,000. At the end of the ten months we held 1,000,000 tons in reserve, or another twelve months’ supply at the current rate of expenditure, apart from further purchases which proceeded ceaselessly on the greatest scale. During this year (1913) also I carried through the House of Commons the Bill authorising the Anglo-Persian Oil Convention. This encountered a confusing variety of oppositions—economists deprecating naval expenditure; members for mining constituencies who were especially sensible of the danger of departing from the sound basis of British coal; oil magnates who objected to a national inroad upon their monopolies; Conservatives who disapproved of State trading; partisan opponents who denounced the project as an unwarrantable gamble with public money and did not hesitate to impute actual corruption. There was always a danger of these divergent forces combining on some particular stage or point. However, we gradually threaded our way through these difficulties and by the Autumn the Convention was the law of the land. We now at any rate had an oil supply of our own.