‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August 9, of the same year, the White Star liner _Arabic_, one day out from Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss. _Dunsley_ in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her; but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the _Dunsley_ and torpedoed the _Arabic_ without a moment’s warning. Boats were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost out of 424. In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of war. This was obviously impossible in the case of the _Arabic_, which was bound from England to America. With regard to the _Lusitania_, an inquiry was held by Judge Julius Meyer of the Federal District Court of New York, who found that the _Lusitania_ did not carry explosives, and added: ‘The evidence presented has disposed, without question and for all time, of any false claims brought forward to justify this inexpressibly cowardly attack on an unarmed passenger steamer.’ The year closed with the torpedoing, again without warning, on December 30, of the P. and O. liner _Persia_, from London to Bombay. She sank in five minutes, and out of a total of 501 on board, 335 were lost with her. Four of her boats were picked up after having been thirty hours at sea. The year 1916 was a not less proud one for Germany; but it was distinctly less joyful. The American people took a fundamentally different view of war, especially of war at sea, and they began to express the difference forcibly. The German Government, after months of argument, was driven to make a show of withdrawing from the most extreme position. They admitted, on February 9, 1916, that their method was wrong where it involved danger to neutrals, and they offered to pay a money compensation for their American victims. They also repeated the pledge they had already given, and broken, that unarmed merchantmen should not be sunk without warning, and unless the safety of the passengers and crew could be assured; provided that the vessels did not try to escape or resist. This again is a purely savage line of thought; no civilised man could seriously claim that he was justified in killing unarmed non-combatants or neutrals by the mere fact of their running away from him. As for the ‘safety of passengers and crew,’ we shall see presently how that was ‘assured.’