“Long before the war began the public had been prepared by an active agitation to believe that the submarine had superseded all other forms of naval force, so that when one cruiser after another was sent to the bottom, almost within hail of the English coast, people really began to believe that no ship could be safe, and that (under a form of attack that was equally impossible to foresee, evade, or resist) our vaunted strength in Dreadnoughts must in time dwindle altogether away. Then there were not wanting circumstances that, superficially at least, looked as if the Admiralty’s war plans and distribution of the Fleet were not adequate to their purpose. In at least one conspicuous instance, the resources of our enemy had been too great either for the means or the measures of our admirals. War had not been declared more than a day or two before the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ made their way through the Mediterranean and escaped unengaged to the Dardanelles. The public knew that we had two powerful squadrons of ships in these waters, one overwhelmingly stronger than the German force; the other, on almost every conceivable train of reasoning, at least a match for it.[B] It seemed utterly humiliating that, with the French Fleet as our allies, and with Germany having none, so important a unit as the _Goeben_ should have got away scot-free. Then it was not long before we heard of the depredations of the _Emden_, and of British ships being chased and threatened in the North and South Atlantic by other German cruisers. [B] I should not say this now. “Against all these things could be set more cheering incidents. Twice the North Sea was swept from top to bottom by the British Fleet, the first resulting in the sinking of three, if not four, cruisers and one destroyer, and in the driving off, apparently hopelessly crippled, of two other cruisers and a great number of smaller craft. The second sweep seemed to show that the entire German Fleet had sought safety in port. Then the _Carmania_ sank the _Cap Trafalgar_, and the _Undaunted_, with a small flotilla of destroyers, ran down and sank an equal flotilla of the enemy’s. But these were not sufficient to outweigh the anxiety which the German submarine successes had caused nor did they restore public confidence in the dispositions of the Admiralty in distant seas, where there were still two powerful armed cruisers, a large number of light cruisers, and an unknown number of armed merchantmen still at large.