“Give me leave, therefore, without offence to live and die in this mind, that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear or danger of death, shunneth his country’s service and his own honour, seeing that death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue immortal.” Great as were the responsibilities and labours of the Navy in the past, they were nothing compared to those of the present. In the days of the brilliant and sagacious Queen Elizabeth, there were no submarines, mines, or torpedoes, and the historian Camden tells us:-- “This great Armada which had been three complete years in rigging and preparing with infinite expense, was within one month’s space many times fought with, and at the last overthrown, with the slaughter of many men, not an hundred of the English being missing, nor any large ship lost.... Whereupon several monies were coined in memory of the victory, some with a fleet flying with full sail; others in honour of the Queen, with fireships and a fleet all in confusion, inscribed _Dux Fœmina facti_, that is, A Woman was conductor in the Fight.” At that time the enemy Spanish Fleet came forth and showed battle, but up to the present the German Fleet, which took much longer than “three years” to prepare, has not been much in evidence till its humble surrender, and its only exhibited warfare was the treacherous method of torpedoing unsuspecting and mostly neutral vessels, some of which had no means of defence. My own heart thrills when I think of our splendid naval men, whose spirits still respond to Nelson’s undying signal--“England expects that every man will do his duty!” The Germans are not a seafaring race. The British are born and bred “of the sea”; the salt and savour of it are mixed with their blood, and for a thousand years they have been accustomed to it in all its wildest moods.