Your hopes and expectation for this dreadful, but glorious, end to all your work do not date from August, eighteen months ago. When as little boys you went to the _Britannia_, you went drawn there by the magic of the sea. It was not the sea that carries the argosies of fabled wealth; it was not the sea of yachts and pleasure boats. It was the sea that had been ruled so proudly by your fathers that drew you. And you, as the youngest of the race, went to it as the heirs to a stern and noble heritage. So, almost from the nursery have you been vowed to a life of hardship and of self-denial, of peril and of poverty--a fitting apprenticeship for those who were destined to bear themselves so nobly in the day of strain and battle. To the mission confided to you in boyhood you have been true in youth and true in manhood. So that when war came it was not war that surprised you, but you that surprised war. When the war came, you from the beginning did your work as simply, as skilfully, and as easily as you had always done it. Not one of you ever met the enemy, however inferior the force you might be in, but you fought him resolutely and to the end. Twice and only twice was he engaged to no purpose. _Pegasus_, disabled and outraged, fell nobly, and the valiant Cradock faced overwhelming odds because duty pointed to fighting. Should the certainty of death stand between him and that which England expects of every seaman? There could only be one answer. In no other case has an enemy ship sought action with a British ship. In every other case the enemy has been forced to fight, and made to fly. It was so from the first. When two small cruisers penetrated the waters of Heligoland with a flotilla of destroyers, the enemy kept his High Seas Fleet, his fast cruisers, and his well-gunned armoured ships in the ignoble safety of his harbours and his canal. He left, to his shame, his small cruisers to fight their battle alone. Tyrwhitt and Blount might, and should, have been the objects of overwhelming attack. But the Germans were not to be drawn into battle. The ascendancy that you gained in the first three weeks of war you have maintained ever since. Three times under the cover of darkness or of fog, the greater, faster units of the German force have--in a frenzy of fearful daring--ventured to cross or enter the sea that once was known as the German Ocean. Three times they have known no alternative but precipitate flight to the place from which they came.