screen grew more exacting. To keep the hostile flotilla out of night range
the screen must be flung out wider and wider, and this meant more and more
cruisers withdrawn from their primary function. And not only this. The
screen must not only be far flung, but it must be made as far as possible
impenetrable. In other words, its own power of resistance must be increased
all along the line. Whole squadrons of armoured cruisers had to be attached
to battle-fleets to support the weaker members of the screen. The crying
need for this type of ship set up a rapid movement for increasing their
fighting power, and with it fell with equal rapidity the economic
possibility of giving the cruiser class its essential attribute of numbers.

As an inevitable result we find ourselves involved in an effort to restore
to the flotilla some of its old cruiser capacity, by endowing it with gun
armament, higher sea-keeping power, and facilities for distant
communication, all at the cost of specialisation and of greater economic
strain. Still judged by past experience, some means of increasing numbers
in the cruising types is essential, nor is it clear how it is possible to
secure that essential in the ranks of the true cruiser. No point has been
found at which it was possible to stop the tendency of this class of vessel
to increase in size and cost, or to recall it to the strategical position
it used to occupy. So insecure is the battle-squadron, so imperfect as a
self-contained weapon has it become, that its need has overridden the old
order of things, and the primary function of the cruising ship inclines to
be no longer the exercise of control under cover of the battle-fleet. The
battle-fleet now demands protection by the cruising ship, and what the
battle-fleet needs is held to be the first necessity.

Judged by the old naval practice, it is an anomalous position to have
reached. But the whole naval art has suffered a revolution beyond all
previous experience, and it is possible the old practice is no longer a