We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet or a commander-in-chief, a blue-jacket or a Royal Marine ("soldier and sailor too"). But we must not enter the Age of Steam and Steel without taking another look at him, if only to see what a great part he plays in our lives and liberties by keeping the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies. Without the Handy Man of the Royal Navy the Merchant Service could not live a day, the Canadian Army could not have joined the other British armies at the front, and the Empire itself would be all parts and no whole, because divided, not united, by the Seven Seas. United we stand: divided we fall. The sea is three times bigger than the land, but three hundred times less known. Yet even our everyday language is full of sea terms; because so much of it, like so much of our blood, comes from the Hardy Norsemen, and because so much of the very life of all the English-speaking peoples depends upon the handy man at sea. Peoples who have Norse blood, like French and Germans, but who have never lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk--all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life we know so little.