[Illustration: THE PIGMY CONQUERER OF THE SEA. A drawing made by the author in 1893 to illustrate the possibilities of his submarine boat, and called "The Pigmy Conquerer of the Sea."] On March 10, 1915, a former chief constructor in the French Navy, M. Lauboeuf, stated: "An English fleet blockades the German coast, but at such a distance that a German division was able to go out and bombard Scarborough. When the English tried a close blockade at the beginning of the war, the German submarines made them pay dearly by torpedoing the _Pathfinder_, _Cressy_, _Hogue_, and _Aboukir_. Similarly the French fleet in the Adriatic was compelled to blockade Austrian ports from a great distance, and the battleships _Jules Ferry_, _Waldeck Rousseau_, and _Jean Bart_ had fortunate escapes from the Austrian fleet." As I write, the submarines of Germany are holding the navies of the Allied Powers in check. The British fleet dares not invade German waters or attempt a close blockade of German ports. In spite of the mighty English navy, the German U-boats--the invisible destroyers--are venturing forth daily into the open Atlantic and are raising such havoc with merchant shipping that the world is terrified at the prospect. It is the German U-boat which to-day encourages the Central Powers to battle almost single-handedly against the rest of the world's great nations. So it is in this surprising manner that the submarine torpedo boat has emerged from its swaddling clothes and has begun to speak for itself. Its progress and development have been retarded for many years by the lack of appreciation of its possibilities on the part of those who have had the planning of naval programs. These have been, for the most part, men of ripe years and experience, and perhaps because of these years of experience they have become ultra-conservative and have been inclined to scoff and doubt the capabilities of any new device until it has been tried out by the fire of actual experience. Notwithstanding the fact that the problem of submarine navigation has been successfully solved for the past fifteen years, it has been only within the past four years that any great naval authority has unqualifiedly endorsed submarines as being of paramount importance in naval affairs. Admiral Sir Percy Scott, in a strong letter to the _London Times_ shortly previous to the beginning of the present war, stated: "The introduction of the vessels that swim under water has, in my opinion, entirely done away with the utility of the ships that swim on top of the water."