If you have not read the above-mentioned story by the author of Sherlock Holmes, I advise you to go to the nearest public library and ask for it. For those that cannot spare the time to do this, here are a brief outline and a few quotations. Captain John Sirius is supposed to be chief of submarines in the navy of Norland, a small European kingdom at war with England. With only eight submarines, he establishes a blockade of Great Britain and begins sinking all ships bringing in food. He enters a French harbor, though France is at peace with his country, and sinks three British ships that have taken refuge there. “I suppose,” says the captain, “they thought they were safe in French waters but what did I care about three-mile limits and international law! The view of my government was that England was blockaded, food contraband, and vessels carrying it to be destroyed. The lawyers could argue about it afterwards. My business was to starve the enemy any way I could.” Presently he overtook an American ship and sank her by gunfire as her skipper shouted protests over the rail. “It was all the same to me what flag she flew so long as she was engaged in carrying contraband of war to the British Isles.... Of course I knew there would be a big row afterwards and there was.” “The terror I had caused had cleared the Channel.” “There was talk of a British invasion (of Norland) but I knew this to be absolute nonsense, for the British had learned by this time that it would be sheer murder to send transports full of soldiers to sea in the face of submarines. When they have a Channel tunnel, they can use their fine expeditionary force upon the Continent but until then it might not exist so far as Europe is concerned.” “Heavens, what would England have done against a foe with thirty or forty submarines?” The British navy could do nothing to stop Captain John Sirius. One of his submarines was sunk by an armed liner, but with the remaining seven he sank the _Olympic_ and so many other vessels that no one dared try to bring food into Great Britain. At the end of six weeks, fifty thousand people there had died of starvation and the British government had to make peace with Norland and pay for all the damage the submarines had done to neutrals. As a warning to his countrymen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this story in May, 1914. Before it was published,[26] England was at war with Germany. On February 4, 1915, the famous “War Zone Decree” was published in Berlin. “The waters around Great Britain, including the whole of the English Channel, are declared hereby to be included within the zone of war, and after the 18th inst, all enemy merchant vessels encountered in these waters will be destroyed, even if it may not be possible always to save their crews and passengers.