I must just hark back to the question of the U-boat here, as the Inspection Commissions in Germany that are seeing to the handing over or destruction of the U-boats bring back their reports here, and their reports are full of interest, though perhaps they contain little that is news to the Admiralty. There are now 135 German submarines in England, and there are more to come yet. The building-yards of Germany show that a huge effort was to have been made along the lines of submarine war in the spring and summer of 1919. Every available yard was working at full power at the date of the cessation of hostilities, and the work was almost entirely on submarine construction. The only other work being done was on new and more powerful destroyers and on standard merchant ships--the latter for after-the-war reconstruction. Yards that had never before done warship work of any kind were fully employed on building small submarines. The big yards were given all the new submarine-cruiser work to do. The submarine cruisers were a comparative failure on trials, as were also the big submarine mine-layers of the U 118 class; this must have been a sad disappointment to the enemy, as one can judge by the number of big boats preparing that he had set his heart on a campaign of thorough frightfulness on the American coast in the spring. Work on the new big surface ships had stopped in the spring of 1918, partly owing to the shortage of nickel and chiefly owing to their whole stake having been put on submarines and not on the Fleet. The German mentality never seems to have grasped the fundamental rule of sea-fighting--that commerce-destruction will never win a war, and that only the defeat or mastery of the main enemy fleet can bring command of the sea. Such yards as the two at Hamburg (Vulcan and Blohm & Voss) are typical of the method of construction. On November 11 these two yards had seventy-two submarines under construction. At the same time at Blohm & Voss's yard the battle-cruiser _Mackensen_ lay abandoned in the water just as she had been launched in the spring of 1918, and the battleship _Ersatz Freya_ lay half-finished on the building-slip. The submarines were on the slips in rows--each row representing a group of perhaps seven boats of the same class. Lying alongside each row were parts and fittings waiting to be built in: for instance, seven bows (complete with sterns and torpedo-tube pads), seven sterns (complete with hydroplane-guards, etc.), seven bow top-strakes, seven stern top-strakes, etc.--in fact, one was reminded strongly of what one had heard of American motor-car factories. The whole idea was of quick and standardised production, and the two points that occurred at once to the observer were--"There would have been a deuce of a rush of new stuff into commission in the spring," and then, "How on earth were they going to provide skilled crews for such a lot of boats all at once?"