Frankly, we see no object in a controversy so empty,
purposeless, and hysterical as that which is raging round Sir Percy Scott's wild letter. As a caveat, however, we may point out that, though there is no case for saying that the submarine is so much the master of the battleship that it is useless to build more Dreadnoughts, there is another and perfectly different case for urging that the Dreadnought policy has been overdone ; that the future may very likely prove to lie with a ship in which the governing motive is attack, not defence—the power to destroy and not the power to resist ; and that the Dreadnought may become as obsolete as the knight and his horse covered with coat-of-mail. An nn- armoured ship, but one with considerable floating power, in which what is lost in defensive armour i3 gained in offensive armament, may very well be the ship of the future. At any rate, Englishmen may devoutly hope that it will be the ship of the future, for in that case we may get back to the happy days when almost any ship could be turned into a battleship, and thus the nation with the biggest general marine was necessarily, to use Bacon's phrase, "The Lady of the Sea."
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