The magnificence of the work of the British patrol flotillas and the auxiliary patrols must be recognised. In the North Sea these are subsidiary services of the Grand Fleet. Day and night, in every weather—in summer heats and winter blasts and blizzards, when icy seas wash the boats from stem to stern and the cold penetrates to the bone—these patrols are at work. The records of heroism at sea in these services have never been surpassed, and England owes a very great deal to the men who came to her service. The mercantile marine has given its vessels to the State, from the luxurious liner to the fishing trawler, and officers and men have come in who have rendered priceless services. The trawlers have carried on their perilous work of bringing up the strange harvest of horned mines by the score. The patrol boats have examined suspicious vessels, controlled sea traffic, and watched the sea passages. The destroyer flotillas have been constantly at work and ready at any time to bring raiding enemy forces to action. The Royal Naval Air Service has never relaxed its activity and has engaged in countless combats. It has sometimes been wondered why the Grand Fleet did not take some aggressive action: Why did it not attack the North German sea coast, or rout out the pestilent hornets’ nest of Zeebrugge, which the enemy, by internal communications impregnable to sea-power, had provided with the most powerful guns, besides defending it by great mine-fields? This matter requires to be examined. Naval history abounds with evidence that to attack coast defences is not the proper or even the permissible work of warships. It is the business of military forces, though naval forces may often assist, and even give the means of victory. Moreover, what was once possible is not possible now. Would Nelson have attacked the French Fleet at the Nile if it had lain under the powerful guns of these days, and behind mine-fields, through the secret passages of which submarines could have issued to destroy him? It would be absurd to compare Nelson’s attack upon a line of block-ships and rafts at Copenhagen, covered by a few forts armed with old smoothbores, to an attack upon coast positions defended by modern guns. When old Sir Charles Napier was in the Baltic in 1854 he was denounced at home because he did not destroy Kronstadt or Helsingfors. He rightly refused to play his enemy’s game by endangering his ships. Captain (afterwards Admiral Sir) B. J. Sulivan, who was with the fleet, put the situation quite clearly in a letter written at the time. A military operation was really required then, as it would be now, to accomplish such a task.