Why are our Second Fleet ships, which do not require a single reservist, to be considered less ready than German ships dependent on mobilised men? Why should it be supposed that a British Fleet is bound to fight the German Fleet at the exact time and place the German Fleet desires? Why should we not, if we wish, refuse battle until any detached division has joined up? Why should we be forced to follow the enemy on to his selected ground (presumably, from your paper, off our coasts) when a movement across his communications would not only place us in healthy waters but cut him from his only hope of retreat and fuel? Why should the British Battle Fleets have to fly the North Sea when the Germans apparently can move about in perfect safety? All this drift of mind is pusillanimous. Put yourself for a few moments in the position of the Admiral Commanding the weaker fleet. If he goes out to fight ‘with every unit,’ he knows he must expect to be attacked by a force at least three to two superior in numbers, superior in addition in strength, and superior by far ship for ship and squadron for squadron, in quality. He knows he will have to move with his weaker force into waters which (to him) will appear ‘infested’ by 70 or 80 British submarines and over 200 sea-going torpedo craft. He knows that he must sooner or later, and sooner much rather than later, return to German ports to coal; and that if he is cut off either by the British Fleet or by the British submarines, or preferably by both, he runs the gravest risk of being not merely defeated but destroyed. If he tries to reduce his inferiority in the line of battle by attempting diversions in the shape of landings, he knows he will have to send transports crowded with men through waters commanded by an unfought superior enemy and swarming with torpedo craft, any one of which will send 5,000 or 6,000 men to the bottom. If he succeeds by great good fortune, probably at a heavy sacrifice, in landing 15,000 or 20,000 men, he knows that is perfectly useless unless it can be reinforced by three or four times as many. He knows that if his raid is not successfully supported within a very few days those already on shore will have been killed or captured, and he will have to begin all over again. Lastly, he knows what people at manœuvres so often forget, viz., that cannons kill men and smash ships and that battles produce decisions against which there is no appeal. He knows that it will pay his enemy to lose ship for ship with him in every class, and that when this melancholy process has run its full course that enemy would still have on the water a fleet in being not less numerous than that with which Germany had begun the war.