One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts—­even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might.  Sixteen—­twenty—­twenty-four—­it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive.  An hour passed and all were not by.  One sat down for a few minutes behind the wind-screen of the destroyer’s bridge, only to look back and see more Dreadnoughts going by.  A spectator had not realized that there were so many in the harbour.  He had a suspicion that Admiral Jellicoe was a conjuror who could take Dreadnoughts out of a hat.

The first was lost in the gathering darkness far out in the North Sea, and still the cloud of smoke over the anchorage was as thick as ever; still the black plumes kept appearing around the bend.  The King Edward VII. class with their four twelve-inch guns and other ancients of the pre-Dreadnought era, which are still powerful antagonists, were yet to come.  One’s eyes ached.  Those who saw a German corps march through Brussels said that it seemed irresistible.  What if they had seen the whole German army?  Here was the counterpart of the whole German army in sea-power and in land-power, too.

The destroyer commander looked at his watch.

“Time!” he said.  “I’ll put you on shore.”

He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment.  A word to the engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth.

Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew.  He was trying to visualize the whole globe—­all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe.  Hong-Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay—­yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—­and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city!  From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight’s play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania, with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it.