Not once has a single merchant ship bound for England been stopped or taken by an enemy ship in home waters. But fifty-six out of eight thousand were overtaken in distant seas. It has been yours to shepherd and protect the vast armies we have sent out from England, and so completely have you done it that not a single transport or supply ship has been impeded between this country and France. From the first there has not been, nor can there now ever be, the slightest threat or the remotest danger of these islands being invaded. Indeed, so utter and complete has been your work that the phrase “Command of the Sea” has a new meaning. The sea holds no danger for us. Allied to other great land powers, we find ourselves able and compelled to become a great land power also. The army of four millions is thus not the least of your creations. So thorough is your work that Britain stands to-day on a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any nation at any time. Has the completeness of your work been impaired by the ravages of the submarine? Its gift of invisibility has seemed to some so mystic a thing that its powers become magnified. Because it clearly _sometimes might_ strike a deadly blow, it was thought that it _always could_ so strike, till madness was piled upon madness, and it seemed as if the very laws of force had been upset, and ships and guns things obsolete and of no use. But you have always known--and we at last are learning--that this is idle talk, and that as things were and as they are, so must they always be; and that sea-power rests as it always has, and as it always will, with the largest fleet of the strongest ships, and with big guns well directed and truly aimed. It did not take you long to learn the trick of the submarine in war, and had things been ordered differently, you might have learned much of what you know in the years of peace. But you learned its tricks so well that it has failed completely to hurt the Navy or the Army which the Navy carries over the sea, and has found its only success in attacking unarmed merchant ships. These are only unarmed because the people of Christendom had never realized that any of its component nations could turn to barbarism, piracy, and even murder in war. It would have been so easy, had this utter lapse into devilry been expected, to have armed every merchant ship--and then where would the submarine have been? But even with the merchantmen unarmed, the submarine success has been greatly thwarted by your splendid ingenuity and resource, your sleepless guard, your ceaseless activity, and the buccaneers of a new brutality have been made to pay a bloody toll. Take it for all in all, never in the history of war has organized force accomplished its purpose at so small a cost in unpreventable loss, or with such utter thoroughness, or in face of such unanticipated difficulties.