s in the
handling of oversea transportation will not be the least bright among
the pages of that absorbing history.

When the European nations first went to war in 1914 I happened to be at
the Newport Naval Training Station, and I asked an officer what would
happen if we went into the war.

"Not much," he said. "We would stand on our shores and the Germans on
theirs and make faces at each other."

Events have proved that he was not looking into the future wisely, not
taking into account the enormous energy and get-things-doneness of
Secretary Daniels and his coadjutors. Not only did the Navy Department
send our destroyer fleet to the war zone--the Allied officers, believing
co-operation of the sort not feasible, had neither requested nor
expected this--but performed many other extraordinary feats, among them
the equipping of transports to carry our men to France, and the conduct
of the service when they were ready.

We had only a fair number of American steamships adapted for the
purpose, but lying in our ports were interned German and Austrian
vessels aggregating many hundreds of thousands of tons. From 1914 until
we entered the war commuters on North River ferry-boats seemed never
weary of gazing at the steamships lying in the great North German Lloyd
and Hamburg-American line piers in Hoboken. There was a small forest of
masts and funnels appearing above the pier sheds, while many a graceful
stern protruded out beyond the pier lines into the river.

Among them was the great _Vaterland_, the largest vessel in the world,
and the outward and visible expression of that peaceful maritime rivalry
between Great Britain and the German Empire, which in the transatlantic
lanes as in the waters of all the seven seas had interested followers of
shipping for so many years. There was, so far as passenger traffic was
concerned, the rivalry for the blue ribbon of the sea--the swiftest
ocean carrier, a fight that was waged between Great Britain and Germany
from the placid eighties to the nineties, when the Germans brought out
the _Deutschland_, and later the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_, the
_Kaiser Wilhelm II_--all champions--whose laurels were to be snatched
away by the _Mauretania_ and the _Lusitania_--the two speed queens--when
war ended competition of the sort.

But the contest in speed had, to an extent, been superseded by the
rivalry of size, a struggle begun by the White Star Line when the great
_Oceanic_ slipped past q