The supreme hour, to which all the anti-submarine labours of the preceding year were merely preliminary, had now arrived. Since the close of the war there has been much discussion of the part which the American navy played in bringing it to a successful end. Even during the war there was some criticism on this point. There were two more or less definite opinions in the public mind upon this question. One was that the main business of our war vessels was to convoy the American soldiers to France; the other emphasized the anti-submarine warfare as its most important duty. Anyone would suppose, from the detached way in which these two subjects have been discussed, that the anti-submarine warfare and the successful transportation of troops were separate matters. An impression apparently prevails that, at the beginning of the war, the American navy could have quietly decided whether it would devote its energies to making warfare on the submarine or to convoying American armies; yet the absurdity of such a conception must be apparent to anyone who has read the foregoing pages. The several operations in which the Allied navies engaged were all part of a comprehensive programme; they were all interdependent. According to my idea, the business of the American navy was to join its forces whole-heartedly with those of the Allies in the effort _to win the war_. Anything which helped to accomplish this great purpose became automatically our duty. Germany was basing her chances of success upon the submarine; our business was therefore to assist in defeating the submarine. The cause of the Allies was our cause; our cause was the cause of the Allies; anything which benefited the Allies benefited the United States; and anything which benefited the United States benefited the Allies. Neither we nor France nor England were conducting a separate campaign; we were separate units of an harmonious whole. At the beginning the one pressing duty was to put an end to the sinking of merchantmen, not because these merchantmen were for the larger part British, but because the failure to do so would have meant the elimination of Great Britain from the war, with results which would have meant defeat for the other Allies. Let us imagine, for a moment, what the sequence of events would have been had the submarine campaign against merchant shipping succeeded; in that case Britain and France would have been compelled to surrender unconditionally and the United States would therefore have been forced to fight the Central Empires alone. Germany's terms of peace would have included the surrender of all the Allied fleets; this would eventually have left the United States navy to fight the German navy reinforced by the ships of Great Britain, Austria, France, and Italy. In such a contest we should have been outnumbered about three or four to one. I have such confidence in the power and purpose of America as to believe that, even in a