At the time of the Dogger Bank action, which confirmed our Navy in its growing conviction that Speed and Power of guns were of supreme importance, the Germans had no guns afloat larger in calibre than 12-inch and seven of the ships in their first line were armed with weapons of 11 inches. They then mustered in all twenty big ships which they could place in the battle line against our available thirty-two, and of their twenty not more than thirteen were of a class comparable even with our older Dreadnoughts. They had nothing to touch our twelve Orions, King Georges, Iron Dukes, all with 13.5-inch guns, and upon a supreme eminence by themselves stood the two new Queen Elizabeths which, if need be, could have disposed of any half-dozen of the weaker German battleships. In the Jutland Battle four Queen Elizabeths—_Barham_, _Warspite_, _Valiant_ and _Malaya_—fought for an hour and more the whole High Seas Fleet. It is no wonder, then, that the Germans did not come out far enough for Jellicoe to get at them. And yet there were silly people ashore who still prattled about the inactivity of the Royal Navy and asked one another “what it was doing.” There is a good story told of the scorn of the professional seamen afloat for the querulous civilians ashore. When the _Lion_ was summoned to lead the battle cruisers in the Dogger Bank action she was lying in the Forth undergoing some slight repairs. As she got up steam a gang of dockyard mateys, at work upon her, pleaded anxiously to be put ashore. They had no stomach for a battle. But there was no time to worry about their feelings; they were carried into action with the ship, and when the shots began to fly they were contemptuously assured by the grizzled old sea dogs, that they were in for the time of their lives. “You wanted to know,” said they, “what the b——y Navy’s doing and now you’re going to see.” While the power of the Grand Fleet dominated the war at sea, some thirty supply ships and transports safely crossed the English Channel every day, and troops poured into Britain and France from every part of our wide-flung Empire. But for that silent, brooding, ever-expanding Grand Fleet, watching over the world’s seas from its eyries on the Scottish coast, not a man or a gun or a pound of stores could have been sent to France, not a man could have been moved from India or Australia, Canada or New Zealand. But for that “idle” Grand Fleet the war would have been over and Germany victorious before the summer and autumn of 1914 had passed into winter. During the war sea power, as always in naval history, has depended absolutely upon the power in men, in ships, and in guns of the first battle line.