t they--the
Fleet--are the pivot of the situation, that without the British Navy, not
all the valour of the Allies in France or Russia could win the war, and
that with it, Germany's hope of victory is vain. While the Navy lives,
England lives, and Germany's vision of a world governed by the ruthless
will of the scientific soldier is doomed.

Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing in her shipyards all this time? No
one knows, but my hosts are well aware that we shall know some day.

As to England--here is Mr. Balfour moving the Naval Estimates in the House
of Commons--the "token votes" which tell nothing that should not be told.
But since the war began, says the First Lord, we have added "one million"
to the tonnage of the Navy, and we have _doubled its personnel_. We are
adding more every day; for the Admiralty are always "wanting more." We are
quite conscious of our defects--in the Air Service first and foremost. But
they will be supplied. There is a mighty movement afoot in the workshops
of England--an effort which, when all drawbacks are allowed for, has
behind it a free people's will.

In my next letter I propose to take you through some of these workshops.
"We get the most extraordinary letters from America," writes one of my
correspondents, a steel manufacturer in the Midlands. "What do they think
we are about?" An American letter is quoted. "So you are still, in
England, taking the war lying down?"

Are we? Let us see.

II

Dear H.

In this second letter I am to try and prove to you that England is _not_
taking the war "lying down."

Let me then give you some account--an eye-witness's account--of what there
is now to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer in the "Munition
Areas," as the public has learned to call them, of England and Scotland.
That great spectacle, as it exists to-day--so inspiring in what it
immediately suggests of human energy and human ingenuity, so appalling in
its wider implications--testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce
stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a
lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran
through the nation, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards the close of
April, 1915. That battle, together with the disagreement between Mr.
Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, had, as we all know,
momentous consequences. The two events brought the national
dissatisfaction and disappoint