That British Mining Policy blocked the North Sea entrance to the Kiel Canal--that British Mining Policy dished the neutrals. When the neutrals got blown up you swore it was a German mine--it was the Germans who began laying mines; and a mine, when it blows you up, don’t hand you a ticket like a passport, saying what nationality it is. In fact, our mines were so damned bad they couldn’t help believing it was a German mine. But I might add I think they would have sunk any Merchant ship, squibs though they were; and I may add in a parenthesis this British policy of submarine mines for the North Sea would have played hell with the German submarines, not so much blowing them up but entangling their screws. Well, at the last--_longo intervallo_--towards the close of the war, being the fifteenth “Too Late” of Mr. Lloyd George’s ever memorable and absolutely true speech, the British Foreign Office did allow this policy, and the United States sent over mines in thousands upon thousands, and we’re still trying to pick ’em up, in such vast numbers were they laid down! _We really are a very peculiar people. Lions led by Asses!_ I bought a number of magnificent and fast vessels for laying down these mines in masses--no sooner had I left the Admiralty in May, 1915, they were so choice that they were diverted and perverted to other uses. But perhaps the most sickening of all the events of the war was the neglect of the Humber as the jumping-off place for our great fast Battle Cruiser force, with all its attendant vessels--light Cruisers, Destroyers, and Submarines, and mine-layers, and mine-sweepers--for offensive action at any desired moment, and as a mighty and absolute deterrent to the humiliating bombardment of our coasts by that same fast German Battle Cruiser force. The Humber is the nearest spot to Heligoland; and at enormous cost and greatly redounding to the credit of the present Hydrographer of the Navy, Admiral Learmonth (then Director of Fixed Defences), the Humber was made submarine-proof, and batteries were placed in the sea protecting the obstructions, and moorings laid down behind triple lines of defence against all possibility of hostile successful attack. However, I had to leave the Admiralty before it was completed and the ships sent there; and then the _mot d’ordre_ was Passivity; and when the Germans bombarded Scarborough and Yarmouth and so on, we said to them _à la Chinois_, making great grimaces and beating tom-toms; “If you come again, look out!” But the Germans weren’t Chinese, and they came; and the soothing words spoken to the Mayors of the bombarded East Coast towns were what Mark Twain specified as being “spoke ironical.” I conclude this Chapter with the following words, printed in the early autumn of 1914:-- “By the half-measures we have adopted hitherto in regard to Open-Sea Mines we are enjoying neither the one advantage nor the other.”