In the House of Commons not long ago a definite statement that the trend of the submarine war was favorable to the Allies was made. The one specific item given was that from January 1 to April 30, 1917, the number of unsuccessful attacks upon British steamships was 172, a weekly average of 10. Last year in the ten weeks from the end of February to the end of April there were 175 unsuccessful attacks, or a weekly average of 18. This statement was not exactly illuminating. For of itself a decline in the weekly number of unsuccessful attacks would imply an increase in the effectiveness of the U-boat--which we know is not so. What the House of Commons statement really meant, of course, was that the number of _successful_ attacks had been declining as well as the number of unsuccessful attacks--or, in other words, that the German sea effort as a whole was declining. The U-boats are not hitting out as freely as they did a year ago. This argues that there are fewer of them than there were in 1917. For actual tonnage losses we have the word of the French Minister of Marine that the sinkings for April, 1918, were 268,000 tons, whereas in April of the previous year they were 800,000 tons, an appalling total. "The most conclusive evidence we have seen of the failure of the enemy's submarine campaign is the huge American army now in France, and the hundreds of thousands of tons of stores brought across the Atlantic," said James Wilson, chairman of the American labor delegation, upon his return to England last May from a visit to France and to the American army. "Less than twelve months have passed since General Pershing arrived in France with 50 men. The developments that have taken place since seem little short of miraculous." Georges Leygues, Minister of Marine of France, in testifying before the Chamber of Deputies in May said that in November of 1917 losses through the submarine fell below 400,000 tons, and since has diminished continuously. He said that the number of submarines destroyed had increased progressively since January of the present year in such proportion that the effectiveness of enemy squadrons cannot be maintained at the minimum required by the German Government. The number of U-boats destroyed in January, February, and March was far greater in each month than the number constructed in those months. In February and April the number of submarines destroyed was three less than the total destroyed in the previous three months. These results, the minister declared, were due to the methodical character of the war against submarines, to the close co-ordination of the Allied navies; to the intrepidity and spirit animating the officers and crews of the naval and aerial squadrons, to the intensification of the use of old methods and to the employment of new ones.