lity, absolutely, greater than
our own; thirdly--that after the British battle-fleet had severed the
German navy from its base, the latter had been just able, under cover of
darkness, to break round the British ships, and fly hard to shelter,
pursued by our submarines and destroyers through the night, till it
arrived at Wilhelmshaven a battered and broken host, incapable at least
for months to come of any offensive action against Great Britain or her
Allies. Impossible henceforth--for months to come--to send a German
squadron sufficiently strong to harass Russia in the Baltic! Impossible to
interfere successfully with the passage of Britain's new armies across the
seas! Impossible to dream any longer of invading English coasts! The
British Fleet holds the North Sea more strongly than it has ever held it;
and behind the barbed wire defences of Wilhelmshaven or Heligoland the
German Fleet has been nursing its wounds.

Some ten weeks have passed, and as these results have become plain to all
the world, the German lie, or what remained of it, has begun to droop,
even in the country of its birth. "Do not let us suppose," says Captain
Persius--the most honest of German naval critics, in a recent
article--"that we have shaken the sea-power of England. That would be
foolishness." While Mr. Balfour, the most measured, the most veracious of
men, speaking only a few days ago to the representatives of the Dominion
Parliaments, who have been visiting England, says quietly--"the growth of
our Navy, since the outbreak of war, which has gone on, and which at this
moment is still going on, is something of which I do not believe the
general public has the slightest conception."

For the general public has, indeed, but vague ideas of what is happening
day by day and week by week in the great shipyards of the Clyde, the Tyne,
and the Mersey. But there, all the same, the workmen--and workwomen--of
Great Britain--(for women are taking an ever-increasing share in the
lighter tasks of naval engineering)--are adding incessantly to the
sea-power of this country, acquiescing in a Government control, a
loosening of trade custom, a dilution and simplification of skilled
labour, which could not have been dreamt of before the war. At the same
time they are meeting the appeal of Ministers to give up or postpone the
holidays they have so richly earned, for the sake of their sons and
brothers in the trenches, with a dogged "aye, aye!" in which there is