To the least prophetic of statesmen--just as to the least instructed students of military history--the situation would have been plain. And there could be but one lesson to be drawn from it. To risk everything on a quick victory over France or Russia was insanity. If the conquest of Europe could not be undertaken with Great Britain an opponent, the alternative was simple. Either the conquest of Great Britain must precede it or the conquest of the world be postponed to the Greek Kalends. Was the conquest of Great Britain a thing so unattainable that it had only to be considered to be discarded as visionary? No doubt, had we been warned and upon our guard, ready to defend ourselves before Germany was ready to strike, then certainly any such scheme must have been doomed to failure. But I am not so sure that a successful attack would have been beyond the resources of those who planned the great European war, had they from the first, grasped the elementary truth that it was necessary to their larger scheme. For to win the conquest of Europe it would not be necessary to crush Great Britain finally and altogether. All that was required was to prevent her interference for, say, six months, and this, it really seems, was far from being a thing beyond the enemy’s capacity to achieve. The essentials of the attack are easy enough to tabulate. First, Germany would have to concentrate in the North Sea the largest force of capital ships that it was possible to equip. Her own force I have already enumerated. Had Germany contemplated war on Great Britain she would, of course, not have sent the _Goeben_ away to the Straits. The nucleus of the German Fleet, then, would have been twenty and not nineteen ships. To these might have been added the three completed Dreadnoughts of the Austrian Fleet, the _Viribus Unitis_, _Tegetthof_, and _Prinz Eugen_--all of which were in commission in the summer of 1914. They would have contributed a broadside fire of 36 12-inch guns--a very formidable reinforcement--and brought the enemy fleet to an almost numerical equality with ours. A review at Kiel would have been a plausible excuse for bringing the Austrian Dreadnoughts into German waters. Supposing the British force, then, to have been undiminished, the war might have opened with a bare superiority of five per cent. on the British side. But there is no reason why British strength should not have been reduced. Knowing as we now do, not the potentialities, but the practical use that can be made of submarines and destroyers, it must be plain to all that, had Germany intended to begin a world war with a blow at Great Britain, she might well have hoped to have reduced our strength to such a margin before the war began, as to make it almost unnecessary to provide against a fleet action. Most certainly a single surprise attack by submarines could have done all that was desired.