He must take his place in the fleet at a given moment. A word to the engine-room and the next thing we knew we were off at thirty knots an hour, cutting straight across the bows of a Dreadnought steaming at twenty knots, towering over us threateningly, with a bone in her teeth. Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was trying to visualize the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso, Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the barrier of that fleet. Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy men behind armour. When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and open markets under the British flag; when you compare the vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania, with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea- power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on women and children would use that power if they had it. XXXIV British Problems Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy. Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals. The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race. Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any American have been puzzled by the delay. "Oh, we should have done better than that--we are Americans!" I hear my countrymen say. Perhaps we should. I hope so; I believe so. The British public thought that they were going to do better; military men were surprised that they did as well.