Referring to battleships, Mr. Churchill said: "If we had not got, at the present time, an unquestionable superiority in battleships, German heavy cruisers would come out into the Atlantic Ocean and, without fear of being brought to account, would be able to obstruct, if not to arrest, the whole of the enormous trade without which we could not live.
They might make temporary bases in different quarters of the globe, and they might establish themselves in positions where Great Britain could have no means whatever of attacking them.
"In this way they would soon bring about our mortal ruin, Happily, we have far greater strength in capital ships than the enemy, and if at any time they break out, as they may do, we are always ready to meet them with much larger forces, and bring them to battle and destroy them, as we did in the isolated case of the Graf Spee. Without a superior battle fleet we could not exercise aby command of the sea, nor even keep ourselves alive with food."
Recalling that during the last war Britain had to keep always ready 30 or 40 battleships, with attendant squadrons and flotillas to fight a main battle at any time, Mr. Churchill said: "Now this preoccupation is greatly diminished. The enemy have only two really big ships, and cannot attempt to form a line of battle. We have at least three, if not four, lines of battle, not one of which the enemy could face in a fought-out engagement.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.