There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a "scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium) they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming to know the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong right arm. But it has no thievish fingers. The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents, as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without the safeguard of the Royal Navy. These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way. The Navy is "The Silent Service." PART II THE GREAT WAR (1914-1918) CHAPTER XXII THE HANDY MAN