Germany could, of course, have done much more to complete our discomfiture. A hundred merchant ships, each carrying three brace of 4-inch guns, and sent as peaceful traders astride the distant trade routes; the despatch of two score or more destroyers to the approaches of the Channel and the Western ports, and all of them instructed--as in fact, eight months afterwards, every submarine was instructed--to sink every British liner and merchantman at sight, without waiting to search or troubling to save passengers or crew--raids organized on this scale and on these principles could have reduced our merchant shipping by a crippling percentage in little more than forty-eight hours. The two things taken together--the assassination of the Fleet, the wholesale murder of the merchant marine--must certainly have thrown Great Britain into a paroxysm of grief and panic. What a moment this would have been for throwing a raiding force, could one have been secretly organized, upon the utterly undefended, and now indefensible, eastern coast! Secretly, skilfully, and ruthlessly executed these three measures could have done far more than make it impossible for Great Britain to take a hand in the defence of France. They might, by the sheer rapidity and terrific character of the blows, have thrown us so completely off our balance as to make us unwilling, if we were not already powerless, to make further efforts even to defend ourselves. At least, so it must have appeared to Germany. For it was the essence of the German case that the nation was too distracted by political differences, too fond of money-making, too debilitated by luxury and comfort, too conscious of its weak hold on the self-governing colonies, too uncertain of its tenure on its oversea Imperial possessions, to stand by its plighted word. The nation has since proved that all these things were delusions. But it was no delusion that Great Britain would be very reluctant to participate in any war. And we need not have fallen so low as Germany supposed and yet be utterly discomposed and incapable of further effort, had we indeed, in quick succession or simultaneously, received the triple onslaught that it was well within the enemy’s power to inflict.