It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some nations to destruction—­as we know.  He—­man or people—­who, boasting of long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of his right hand is a fool.  The pride and trust of the nation in its Navy so strangely mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified.  It is also very proper:  for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes offered to the deserving.

But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of irritation.  No recognition was thrust on it offensively, and, truth to say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own obscure merit.  It had no consciousness.  It had no words.  It had no time.  To these busy men their work was but the ordinary labour of earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like the sun itself, the commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with no spiritual lustre.  They were everyday men.  They were that, eminently.  When the great opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a supreme call they received it with characteristic simplicity, incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and, as far as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind’s catastrophic time within the rigid rules of their professional conscience.  And who can say that they could have done better than this?

Such was their past both remote and near.  It has been stubbornly consistent, and as this consistency was based upon the character of men fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure.  Such changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part mechanical and affecting only the material conditions of that inbred consistency.  That men don’t change is a profound truth.  They don’t change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could accomplish that miracle.  It is enough for them to be infinitely adaptable—­as the last four years have abundantly proved.

III.

Thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with unshaken confidence.  Whether the hues of sunrise are angry or benign, gorgeous or sinister, we shall always have the same sky over our heads.  Yet by a kindly dispensation of Providence the human faculty of astonishment will never lack food.  What could be more surprising for instance, than the calm invitation to Great Britain to discard the force and protection of its Navy?  It has been suggested, it has been proposed—­I don’t know whether it has been pressed.  Probably not much.  For if the excursions of audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, reason has the habit of never straying very far away from its throne.