Eight million men moved across the seas—­almost without mishap.

  Nine million and a half tons of explosives carried to our own armies
  and those of our Allies.

  Over a million horses and mules; and—­

  Over forty-seven million gallons of petrol supplied to the armies.

  And besides, twenty-five thousand ships have been examined for
  contraband of war, on the high seas, or in harbour, since the war
  began.

And at this, one must pause a moment to think—­once again—­what it means; to call up the familiar image of Britain’s ships, large and small, scattered over the wide Atlantic and the approaches to the North Sea, watching there through winter and summer, storm and fair, and so carrying out, relentlessly, the blockade of Germany, through every circumstance often of danger and difficulty; with every consideration for neutral interests that is compatible with this desperate war, in which the very existence of England is concerned; and without the sacrifice of a single life, unless it be the lives of British sailors, often lost in these boardings of passing ships, amid the darkness and storm of winter seas.  There, indeed, in these “wave-beaten” ships, as in the watching fleets of the English Admirals outside Toulon and Brest, while Napoleon was marching triumphantly about Europe, lies the root fact of the war.  It is a commonplace, but one that has been “proved upon our pulses.”  Who does not remember the shock that went through England—­and the civilised world—­when the first partial news of the Battle of Jutland reached London, and we were told our own losses, before we knew either the losses of the enemy or the general result of the battle?  It was neither fear, nor panic; but it was as though the nation, holding its breath, realised for the first time where, for it, lay the vital elements of being.  The depths in us were stirred.  We knew in very deed that we were the children of the sea!

And now again the depths are stirred.  The development of the submarine attack has set us a new and stern task, and we are “straitened till it be accomplished.”  The great battle-ships seem almost to have left the stage.  In less than three months, 626,000 tons of British, neutral and allied shipping have been destroyed.  Since the beginning of the war we—­Great Britain—­have lost over two million tons of shipping, and our Allies and the neutrals have lost almost as much.  There is a certain shortage of food in Great Britain, and a shortage of many other things besides.  Writing about the middle of February, an important German newspaper raised a shout of jubilation.  “The whole sea was as if swept clean at one blow”—­by the announcement of the intensified “blockade” of the first of February.  So the German scribe.  But again the facts shoot up, hard and irreducible, through the sea of comment.  While the German newspapers were shouting to each other, the sea was so far from being “swept