From the first day of the war, he said, the British Navy had exercised the full and unquestioned command of the sea. So long as it really remained unchallenged and unbeaten the superior fleet ruled all the open waters of the world. From the beginning it had enjoyed all the fruits of a complete victory. Had Germany never built a Dreadnought, or if all the German Dreadnoughts had been sunk, the control and authority of the British Navy could not have been more effective. There had been no Trafalgar, but the full consequences of a Trafalgar had been continuously operative. There was no reason why this condition of affairs should not continue indefinitely. Without a battle we had all that the most victorious of battles could give us. This was the true starting point of any reflections on the war by sea. We were content! As for Jutland, there was no need for the British to seek that battle at all. There was no strategic cause or compulsion operating to draw our battle fleet into Danish waters. If we chose to go there it was because of zeal and strength. A keen desire to engage the enemy impelled, and a cool calculation of ample margins of superiority justified, a movement not necessarily required by any practical need. The battle must, therefore, be regarded as an audacious attempt to bring the enemy to action, arising out of consciousness of overwhelming superiority! A little consideration will, I think, convince us that Mr. Churchill was altogether wrong in supposing that a decisive action was not highly important to us at this time. For obviously the German Fleet came out to do something, and if my suggestion is right--that its mission was to raise German _moral_--we had first the obvious duty of preventing the German Fleet doing anything it wished to do, and next an insistent duty to depress German _moral_, at least as much as Admiral Scheer wished to raise it. Apart from any material or directly military results, a second Trafalgar, had it really broken the hearts of German civilians, might have been an element decisive of the power of the German people to endure the privations that the prolongation of war inflicts upon them. It might finally have broken down the whole structure of lying bluff that the Emperor’s government has maintained. This would have been a military object of the first value and importance. If the war is to end by the collapse, not of the German Army but of the German people, the value of such a victory and such a result can be measured by the number of days of war that it would have saved at a cost in men and treasure that it is hard to calculate.