It had one lamentable and disastrous consequence. _Emden_ was captured before the battle-cruisers left their English port. _Karlsruhe_ was never heard of again, and the rumours of her destruction seemed before December to be well founded, so that after the victory of December 8th, beyond the fugitive _Dresden_ and two armed liners unaccounted for, there was not a German ship in the world to threaten a single British trade or territorial interest. For _Koenigsberg_, if she had escaped the guns of the two ships that had attempted her destruction in the mouth of the Rufigi, which was doubtful, was at any rate so closely blockaded that her power for active mischief was clearly at an end. German naval force was then limited to the High Seas Fleet, still of course intact, but with apparently no wish to attempt an active, and no power to make an effective, offensive. Of this force Sir John Jellicoe seemed to have taken the measure. Four months of activity, strenuous and anxious beyond description, had made our fleet bases proof against submarine attack, so that the only offensive open to the German fleet, that embodied in the policy of attrition, was no longer a menace. The submarine attack on trade was unexpected. At a blow, then, Whitehall, which for four months had been kept on tenterhooks by its unpreparedness for cruiser or submarine warfare, suddenly found itself without a naval care in the world. But Mr. Churchill could not be idle, and the tempter planted in his fertile brain the crazy conception that the unemployed and unemployable fleet should add to his laurels, by repeating, on the Dardanelles forts the performances of the German howitzers at Liège, Maubeuge, and Antwerp. The failure of the Naval Brigade at Antwerp was to be picturesquely avenged. In judging of the results of the Falkland Islands battle then, we must set against its immediate and resounding benefits the humiliating tragedy of Gallipoli. THE TACTICS OF THE BATTLE The battle of the Falkland Islands, as we have seen, resolved itself into three separate engagements, and two of these may be taken as classic examples of the tactics of superior speed and armament, unconfused by the long-distance torpedo. It was this theory of tactics that held the field in England from 1904 or 1905, when the Dreadnought policy was definitely adopted, until 1912 or 1913 when the effect in naval action of the new torpedo, was first exhaustively analyzed. These actions, then, taken in conjunction with the _Sydney_-_Emden_ fight, stand entirely by themselves, and it is possible that very little naval fighting will ever take place again under similar conditions.