The men who personally felt aggrieved, however, were the professional politicians and the private Member. These men were seriously perturbed. Here was real limelight, and they were not in it! Horrible thought! Their course lay clearly before them. An attack upon inoffensive paper, by a pen, erroneously believed to be mightier than the sword, was their only hope of making up leeway. So those who had sufficient influence hurled broadcast the next morning, in their favorite daily papers, a wealth of ill-considered and valueless criticism and opinion of something which they were splendidly incompetent to judge. And the cause of all the sensation? It was so small an incident, and yet so tremendous in its omen for the future. Just the story of a number of eminent men, Cabinet Ministers, naval and army men, and one or two great ship-builders, running a blockade of warships, and successfully shipping a cargo of pretended contraband of war from Dundee to Gravesend. The game had been played in deadly earnest. It was a test trip for a new type of submersible cargo and passenger vessel, pitting its powers against the concentrated might of a large squadron of the British Navy. It was a test of efficiency. The details were simple in the extreme. The laden vessel, carrying a thousand tons of merchandise and its burden of passengers, was lying at Dundee. Outside, watching and waiting for its appearance on the high seas, lay a powerful squadron of the British Navy. The rules laid down were that the submersible should make its way to Gravesend, and the naval squadron, under war conditions, was to capture it, or place it in such a position as to be sinkable, by any means in its power, at any point upon its journey. The result. With all the skill and power at its command the great surface squadron had proved its helplessness. The submersible had slipped out of port under cover of darkness, and from that moment, until its arrival at Gravesend, the seas had been scoured vainly for so much as a sight of it. It was a tremendous thought. It was a splendid victory for the pacifist hope. The dead Polish inventor had been justified beyond all question. Never had the word "epoch," such as Fleet Street loves, been better used. It was such a moment that those who made the secret journey, and witnessed the capabilities of the vessel which had been built at the Dorby yards, were flung back from all preconceived convictions of maritime affairs, established during the war, to imaginative speculation upon the vista of progress now opened up.