Let us sum up. The Germans, with years of preparation behind them, made this war a war of machines. England, in that as in other matters, was taken by surprise. But our old and proud nation, which for generations led the machine industry of the world, as soon as it realised the challenge--and we were slow to realise it!--met it with an impatient and a fierce energy which is every month attaining a greater momentum and a more wonderful result. The apparently endless supply of munitions which now feeds the British front, and the _comparative_ lightness of the human cost at which the incredibly strong network of the German trenches on their whole first line system was battered into ruin, during the last days of June and the first days of July, 1916:--it is to effects like these that all that vast industrial effort throughout Great Britain, of which I saw and described a fragment three months ago, has now steadily and irresistibly brought us. II This then is perhaps the first point to notice in the landscape of the war, as we look back on the last three months. For on it everything else, Naval and Military, depends:--on the incredibly heightened output of British workshops, in all branches of war material, which has been attained since the summer of last year. In it, as I have just said, we see an _effect_ of a great cause--i.e., of the "effort" made by Great Britain, since the war broke out, to bring her military strength in men and munitions to a point, sufficient, in combination with the strength of her Allies, for victory over the Central Powers, who after long and deliberate preparation had wantonly broken the European peace. The "effort" was for us a new one, provoked by Germany, and it will have far-reaching civil consequences when the war is over. In the great Naval victory now known as the Battle of Jutland, on the other hand, we have a fresh demonstration on a greater scale than ever before, of that old, that root fact, without which indeed the success of the Allied effort in other directions would be impossible--i.e., _the overwhelming strength of the British Navy_, and its mastery of the Sea.