But apart altogether from this, there were other considerations, some economic and some military, so immensely serious, as would certainly have justified Sir David Beatty in risking, not three, but all his battle-cruisers, if by so doing he could have insured the entire destruction of the German Fleet by Sir John Jellicoe’s forces. To realize this point we must carry our consideration of the naval strategy of the two sides in this war a little further. We have seen that our method of disposing of our forces in the North Sea gave the German Fleet a certain limited freedom of manœuvre in the irregular quadrilateral formed by Peterhead, the Skagerack, Heligoland, and Lowestoft. Outside of this area there was not, after December 8, 1914, a single German warship afloat that was not a fugitive or in hiding, nor has any surface ship ventured outside this area since. When the careers of _Karlsruhe_ and _Emden_ terminated, the period of systematic capture of our trading ships closed also. But Von Tirpitz was very far from being satisfied with the situation so created. The Grand Admiral was wildly wrong in the kind of navy that he built for Germany, and hopelessly at sea in his forecast of the action England would take in the kind of war that Germany intended to provoke. But when the events of the first few months showed that the war would be a long one, it is not certain that he was not the first European in authority to realize to the full the rôle sea-power would play. In a long war, the merchant shipping of the world--and it was immaterial whether it was belligerent or neutral--would obviously be the one thing by which the Allies, by importations of raw material, and the manufactures of America, the British colonies, and Japan, could counterbalance the vastly superior organization of the Central Powers for working their industries and factories. Shipping was at once the source of supply of the whole Alliance and the military communications of the most formidable of them. The German submarines had had a small initial success against British warships. It was disappointing from the point of view of the attrition that Germany had hoped for. But it opened Von Tirpitz’s eyes to the immense possibilities of a submarine attack on trading ships. He saw, then, both the necessity of cutting the Allies off from the sea, and the means of cutting them off. The plan was an outrageous one from the point of view of morals. But Von Tirpitz’s conception of the importance of sea supplies to the Allies was perfectly correct, and in organizing an attack upon it he was striking straight at the heart of our power of carrying on the war.