DycombcT II, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER, 
SEA BLINDNESS. 
By ARTHUR POLLEN. 
FOK two months or more the principles of 
naval administration have in these 
columns been discussed more often and 
at greater length than the naval opera- 
tions of the day. To some extent this may be 
explained by the fact that there have been very few- 
naval operations to record, and none of those 
novel or dramatic. But it is still more due to the 
fact that, with every day's endurance of the war, the 
importance of our sea-power and its potency to 
intervene with decisive effect grows greater and 
greater. To use it boldly, decisively, but beyond 
all wisety is, then, one of the most urgent problems. 
And its right use is almost unattainable unless it 
is administered on the right principles. 
Mr. Churchill's apology laid bare the system that 
had brought such confusion to the Navy in the first 
nine months of the war. The criticisms of that 
apology have resulted in two exceedingly important 
reforms. Mr. Asquith has once more placed 
responsibility for naval administration on the Board 
of Admiralty, from whom it ought never to have 
been taken. And last week the House of Commons 
was fortunate enough to attend the obsequies of 
the unhappy Declaration of London. Had naval 
opinion governed the Navy when that instrument 
was under discussion, it is certain it would never 
have seen the light. Had naval opinion governed 
the Navy at the opening of the war, the Declaration 
rejected by Parliament would never have been 
adopted by the Government by an act which the 
best lawyers believed to have been outside the 
constitution. So long as the Declaration was 
even nominally in existence, it furnished the 
occasion and was made the excuse for hampering 
the action of the Fleet in a thousand particulars 
that redounded to the enemy's advantage. Of 
late the Trade division of the Admiralty has re- 
asserted in a great measure the Navy's authority. 
It has not been satisfied with mere freedom from 
the Declaration. It has found new and effective 
ways of limiting the comfort and help that our 
enemy, impotent himself at sea, has drawn from 
the undue sea liberty of neutrals. It is not neces- 
sary to specify the measures by which these ends 
have been achieved. But those measures could 
never have come into being had not a new authority 
been given to the seamen to over-ride the un-naval 
policies of the civilian amateurs, both at the 
Admiralty and at the Foreign Office. One in- 
ference seems legitimate from this double success — 
namely, the final abandonment of the Declaration 
and the discovery of a new form of sea pressure on 
neutrals. Would not Whitehall generally gain 
by a further infusion of trained naval energy ? 
No one looking back on the events of the last 
16 months can deny that, however much we may 
have misused our sea-power by administering it on 
faulty principles, our blindness to our sea power 
has been even more conspicuous. The fact is 
admitted by all these recent changes of policy. 
But these after all only free the Navy from obvious 
limitations to its power. It does not at all follow 
that all the possible exercises of its power are as 
(jbvious. There is no body of men in England 
mure original or more in\enti\e than the officers 
of the fleet. It is only at sea, and with tlie respon- 
sibility of immediate action constantly before them 
that this inventiveness enjoys free pla}-. Kemov . 
your naval officer from the " freedom of the seas ' 
to the confinement of a London office, tangle hm 
in the meshes of civilian-made rules, confuse hin 
with the counsel of unmilitary Government Depart-' 
ments, the Foreign Office, "the Board of Trade, 
etc., and it is not long before his enterprise is 
crushed out of him, and a first-class war spirit 
is being converted into a second-rate clerk. If 
naval policy is, in reality, as well as in theory, 
committed to naval officers; if the inter-change 
between land and sea is constant ; if the change 
from a ship to an office chair does not involve a 
surrender of the fleet habit of thinking ; if the 
fleet atmosphere can truly be preserved at White- 
hall, then we may see new departures that will 
hit the enemy harder than any blows yet. 
ROOT FACTS OF SEA-FOWER. 
Mr. Asquith's restoration of the Board of 
Admiralty to its old dignity, and the freeing of the 
Navy from its shackles can, then, be made effec- 
tive ; but two things are vital. All questions to 
do with neutral shipping and neutral trade must 
be settled by the Board of Admiralty, and the 
Board must see to it that the constitution, not 
only of itself, but of the whole organisation that 
serves it, is revivified by a generous transfusion of 
new blood from the fleet. By all means let the 
naval men have every atom of information that 
Diplomacy, the experts of the Board of Trade, 
Lloyd's, the shipping, and the export interests can 
give them. But let it also be seen to that it is 
information that is supphed to them and not 
advice, and if advice, that there is no authority 
compelUng their acceptance of it. 
This matter is really urgent, because it is 
quite clear from the events of the last six weeks 
that the German people are quite as blind to the 
root facts of sea-power as we ourselves. Intelli- 
gent readers of the daily press must have been 
greatly puzzled during these weeks to put a true 
meaning on German talk about the privations of 
the poor and the general yearning for peace. 
Some have supposed both discussions to be 
examples- of a clumsy German effort at mystifica- 
tion. But that the German poor are having a very 
hard time, and that all classes are longing for the 
war to end, are too real for this theory to be 
credible. 
The Reichstag was summoned, many weeks 
before its due date, in obedience to the Socialist 
insistence — in the first days of November— that 
the " shortage of food and State of Siege " in 
Berlin needed immediate and representative dis- 
cussion. And the summoning of the Reichstag 
brought the yearning for peace to a head. Thus 
the Government has been forced into an official 
admission as to Germany's economic state and 
Germany's state of mind that are obviously 
damaging to her prestige in the neutral countries. 
It is, at any rate, unusual for the victors to be 
so very weary of conquest. The Wireless effort 
to diminish this loss of prestige was of a clumsiness 
15 
