That being so, our duty, the Prime Minister declared, was
to " maintain our naval supremacy at such a point that we could not lose the command of the sea ; and it is against any reasonably possible combination to be brought against us that we must hold the sea and make invasion an impracticable attempt." It did not follow from this that we required no army for home defence. We needed an army at home, in the first place, for repelling insignificant raids which might be able to evade the vigilance of the Navy, and next, we wanted an army so efficient in numbers and organisation that no sane opponent would contemplate invasion except with a very con- siderable force. But the larger the enemy's force the more difficult the task of evading the Navy. Such evasion, the Admiralty consider, would not be possible for an army of seventy thousand men. But to make sure of repelling such an army a considerably larger force must be kept in these islands.
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