What would have happened to the Mother Country and to her extensive Colonial Possessions had not Lord Northcliffe, through the powerful newspapers he controls, stepped in from time to time and torn off the scales which had been plastered and bandaged upon the eyes of an all-too-confiding British public, and just in the nick of time to save disaster upon disaster too awful to contemplate? It is not necessary to enumerate the many and vital matters which Lord Northcliffe helped an indignant and a deluded public to consider and discuss, whereby the Government was roused from its torpor and pushed into reluctant activity, but the greatest of all canards which it had attempted to foist upon Europe does very much concern the subject-matter of this volume, hence it must be separately dealt with. It is this so-called blockade, which amongst Teuton traders in Northern neutral countries was looked upon as the best of all "war jokes"! It seems to be universally believed that had the British Fleet been given a free hand and its direction left to the discretion of a good, business-like, fighting Sea Lord, the war would have been over within eighteen months from the first declaration. As it has happened, the freedom of action of our Fleet has been so hampered that our enemies have actually been permitted to draw certain food supplies not only from our own Colonies, but from the United Kingdom itself. How can it be argued that this suicidal policy has not helped to drag out the war and add to its terrible and unnecessary wastage of life and wealth, with the aftermath of woe and misery consequent thereon? For our Ministers to affirm that Germany has been starved by our blockade is as untrue as it is ridiculous. The bunkum which has filled the thousands upon thousands of Press columns in different countries on this subject has been mere chimerical effort, in great part subsidised from indirect pro-German sources of more or less remote origin in accordance with the value of the publication used. Now for a dissection of the facts concerning the main subject. Passing over innumerable paragraphs in the Press which hinted at much more than they disclosed, attention should be given to an article which appeared in the January (1916) number of the _National Review_ (pp. 771-780), in which a naval correspondent gives record of a startling amount of supplies of cotton, copper, oils, foodstuffs and other commodities that were permitted to pass into Germany by permission of our benevolent Government.