"We have not taken full advantage of our mastery of the sea. In every department we observe doubt, hesitation, and procrastination. War requires quick decisions and prompt actions. The question of supplying recruits for the Army has been postponed once, and apparently may be postponed again. Unless a decision is come to immediately we shall be a year before the recruits joined under any new scheme can possibly be ready to take the field. "The public is sick of the policy conveyed in the sentence ’Wait and see.’ The danger to the Empire becomes more apparent every day. The country is waiting for a strong, clear lead. Our present methods will prolong the war indefinitely. If we continue hesitating without making up our minds on any single question connected with the war, we shall plunge straight into disaster." I, too, shall be a pessimist about England’s chances to win the war only so long as she neglects to _go to war_. Mere command of the sea, it has been amply demonstrated, can not crush Germany. It can sorely inconvenience her and compel her to live on the ration basis, but it can not force what King George has called "a highly organized enemy" prematurely to make peace. When England has staked her all, I shall turn blithe optimist, for I believe that nothing else in the world can overthrow her savagely efficient antagonist. Germany has staked her _all_. Until England does likewise, they will not fight on even terms. When England, like Germany, has relentlessly marshaled every tithe of her national strength for war, subordinated all else to that purpose, harnessed to the chariot of Mars every conceivable resource at her command, pulverized caste distinctions, banned politics and politicians, and made the war and the winning of it the only thing the nation eats for, works for, dreams of, or wastes thought upon--then I shall feel constrained to feel assured that victory will perch, however distant the hour, on Liberty’s and not on Tyranny’s banners. The Anglo-German endurance test--into which the war will eventually resolve itself--can have but one issue. Germans know that. Their analytical mind long ago taught them that the dormant resources of the British Empire, _once mobilized_, would be invincible. But what is happening is precisely what the Germans counted upon: the irresolute British habit of mind, the "too late" system, the century-old cult of comfort and ease, the "Splendid Isolation" school of thought, which, when the hour of trial came, might be relied upon to cripple the effort to convert latent potentialities into an inconquerable organism. History will have names for all these things. It will call them Belgium, Serbia, Dardanelles and Salonica.