well known here. Tradition and moral count even more afloat than ashore; we possess both. A Navy whose chief achievements have been the drowning of helpless non-combatants in the infamous submarine campaign may hardly be said to possess either.

For many months now the German flag has vanished from the ocean highways of the world. For many months British commerce has peacefully pursued its pathways to the uttermost ends of the earth.

There have been times when the depredations of German raiders, such as the “Emden,” caused some inconvenience and considerable loss. There have been times when the submarine campaign has apparently had a great measure of success. But though many ships, with their cargoes and with many innocent lives, have been sunk, nothing which the German pirates could do was sufficient seriously to threaten our overseas trade. Very soon the marauders were rounded up and destroyed, and in a space of time which, before the War, would have been deemed incredible the seas were practically free for the passage of the ships of the Allies.

In the early days of the War many good judges believed that the German commerce raiders would have been as effective against our overseas trade as were the French privateers in the days of the Napoleonic wars. Certain it is that it was the universal expectation that our losses in mercantile tonnage would have been far more grievous than has proved to be the case.

We see now that this expectation was unduly alarmist. But it was entertained not merely by amateur students of war, but by many of the sailors who have given a lifetime of thought to the problems of warfare at sea. Every lesson that could be drawn from history suggested that the life of the German raiders would have been far longer than actually proved to be the case. Those lessons, however, were learned in the days when the war fleets were composed of great sailing vessels which could keep the sea far longer without fresh supplies than is possible to-day. Cut off from any possible sources of regular supplies of food, coal, and ammunition, the few German ships which remained at liberty when war broke out were quickly hunted down by superior forces and destroyed until, a very few months after the outbreak of war, Germany’s strength afloat was closely confined to the Baltic and a very small portion of the North Sea.

Nothing like the achievements of the British Navy has ever been witnessed in the history of war. Not even the most enthusiastic believer in sea power could have dreamed of such brilliant and striking successes; not even the most enthusiastic admirer of the British Navy could, in his most sanguine moments, have expected such results as have been attained.

When we come to think of the expanse of ocean to be covered, the services which the British Navy has rendered to civilisation will be seen to be stupendous. Not merely have all the German ships which were at liberty outside the North Sea and the Baltic been hunted down and destroyed, but the Grand Fleet, the darling of the Kaiser’s heart, the object upon which millions have been poured out like water with the express purpose of crushing Britain, has been penned up in the narrowest of quarters, and from every strategical point of view has been reduced to practical impotence. True, it succeeded, under cover of fog and darkness, in sending a squadron of fast ships to bombard undefended Scarborough, where its gallant efforts resulted in the killing and wounding of some hundreds of women, children, and other non-combatants who, had we been fighting a civilised foe, would have been perfectly safe from harm. But a repetition of the attempt at this dastardly crime led to such condign punishment that the effort has never been repeated, and from that day to this German excursions at sea, so far, at least, as British waters are concerned, have been confined to the occasional appearance of stray torpedo craft and the campaign of submarine piracy and murder which has left upon the name of the German Navy a stigma which it will take centuries to eradicate.

With the one solitary exception of the unequal fight off Coronel, where the “Good Hope” and “Monmouth” were destroyed by the greatly superior squadron of Von Spee, the Germans have uniformly had the worse of any sea fighting which they ventured to undertake. Even the Baltic, in which they fondly imagined they had undisputed supremacy, has been rendered more than “unhealthy” by the activities of British submarines—so unhealthy, in fact, that the German attack upon the Gulf of Riga, which was to have led to the crushing of the Russian right wing and the advance upon Petrograd, ended in a dismal failure and the precipitate flight of the attackers. That they will be any more successful in the future is practically unthinkable. Stronger, both relatively and actually, than before the War, the British Navy calmly awaits “the day,” hoping it may soon come, when the Germans will stake their existence upon a last desperate effort to challenge that mastery of the sea the hope of which must be slipping for ever from their grasp.

It is only necessary to say a few words about the atrocious policy of submarine “frightfulness” which culminated in the sinking of the “Lusitania” and the deliberate sacrifice of the lives of some 1,200 innocent people who had nothing whatever to do with the War. That policy, the deluded German people were solemnly assured, was to bring Britain to her knees by cutting off supplies of food and raw material, and starving her into submission. It is worth noting in this connection that the Germans to-day are calling upon heaven and earth to punish the brutal English for attempting to “starve the German people” by a perfectly legitimate blockade carried out in strict accordance with the rules of international law. We heard nothing of the iniquities of the “starvation” policy as long as the Germans hoped to be able to apply it to us in the same way that they applied it to Paris during the war of 1870-71; it was only when they realised that the submarine policy had failed that they began the desperate series of appeals, directed especially to the United States, that they were being unfairly treated owing to Britain refusing to allow them the “freedom of the seas”—in other words, refusing to sit idly by while Germany obtained from the United States and elsewhere the food and munitions of which she stood, and stands, in such desperate need.

As a matter of fact, the German submarine campaign has not even succeeded in reducing appreciably the strength of the British mercantile marine.

Despite our losses, our mercantile marine is to-day, thanks to new building and purchases, but little weaker than when war broke out, while, so far as we can judge, the submarine campaign has failed to contribute in the slightest degree to the rise in food values which has imposed so great a burden upon large classes of people in our country. It has been in fact, a complete and absolute failure. It has cost us, it is true, many valuable vessels and many valuable lives, but as a means to ending the War it has achieved practically nothing. The policy of terrifying by murder has prospered no more afloat than it did ashore, while outside the ranks of the combatants it has done nothing but earn for Germany the contempt of the whole civilised world, to bring Germany within an ace of war with the United States, and to brand the German Navy and the entire German nation with an indelible stain of blood and crime.

The submarine policy was a policy which could have been justified only by complete success. It may suit the German Press, led by the nose by the Government, to tell the German people that hated England was being rapidly subdued by the efforts of the “heroic” murderers commanding the German U-boats. We know differently.