Seventy ships and the two-power standard

The program comprised fourteen dockyard battleships, four contract battleships, forty-two protected cruisers, and ten smaller ships. Salisbury projected that the wider building program would leave Britain 113 ships stronger by 1894. He tested the battleship total against combinations of France, Germany, Russia, and Italy, while noting that some ships counted as French or German armored battleships were actually small coastal-defense vessels. In the quoted speech, protected cruisers are distinguished from armored ships by concentrating protection over their vital parts. The protected-cruiser comparison was even more striking: Britain's projected eighty-eight equaled twice the combined total of those four powers. The resulting two-power standard made force structure and fleet arithmetic explicit instruments of national strategy and deterrence.