ormerly, in the
condition of comparative crudeness with which international trade was then
organised, concealment was relatively easy, at least for a time. But the
ever-growing sensitiveness of world-wide commerce, when market movements
are reported from hour to hour instead of from week to week, has greatly
increased the difficulty. And apart from the rapidity with which
information may be gathered through this alert and intimate sympathy
between Exchanges, there is the still more important fact that with
wireless the speed of conveying naval intelligence has increased in a far
higher ratio than the speed of sea transit.

As regards the ratio between cruiser and convoy speeds, on which evasion so
much depends, it is the same. In frigate days the ratio appears to have
been not more than seven to five. Now in the case at any rate of large
convoys it would be nearly double.

Of the destructive power of the flotilla, growing as it does from year to
year, enough has been said already. With the advent of the torpedo and
submarine it has probably increased tenfold. In a lesser degree the same is
true of cruisers. In former days the physical power of a cruiser to injure
a dispersing convoy was comparatively low, owing to her relatively low
excess of speed and the restricted range and destructive power of her guns.
With higher speed and higher energy and range in gun power the ability of
cruisers to cut up a convoy renders its practical annihilation almost
certain if once it be caught, and consequently affords a moral deterrent
against trusting to evasion beyond anything that was known before.

The increased ratio of battle-fleet speed to that of large convoys is
equally indisputable and no less important, for the facility of finding
interior positions which it implies goes to the root of the old system. So
long as our battle-fleet is in a position whence it can cover our flotilla
blockade or strike the enemy's convoy in transit, it forces his
battle-fleet in the last resort to close up on the convoy, and that, as
Kempenfelt pointed out, is practically fatal to the success of invasion.

From whatever point of view, then, we regard the future chances of
successful invasion over an uncommanded sea, it would seem that not only
does the old system hold good, but that all modern developments which touch
the question bid fair to intensify the results which our sea service at
least used so confidently to expect, and which it never f