In fact, however, the sober confidence of the Admiralty was based upon calculations of relative naval strength, the soundness of which was not disputed by the German Naval Staff. Even von Tirpitz, the advocate of action, writes (p. 356): ‘Against an immediate fight was the fact that the whole English Fleet was ready for battle when the war broke out owing to the test mobilisation, whereas only our active squadrons were ready.’ ‘Great Britain,’ says the Official German Naval History, ‘... had secured extensive military advantages by her test mobilisation and her subsequent measures, regardless of the uneasiness necessarily provoked thereby ... which advantage Germany could not counter or overtake.’ The German Staff felt that even if this was the best chance for a trial of strength, it was still a chance so hazardous and even so forlorn that it was not worth taking; and their Battle Fleet remained hoarded up in harbour for an ignominious day, imposing upon the British, no doubt, a continued and serious expenditure of our resources for naval purposes, gaining for Germany substantial advantages of a secondary character, but not exercising any decisive influence upon the whole course of the war. So we waited; and nothing happened. No great event immediately occurred. No battle was fought. The Grand Fleet remained at sea: the German Fleet did not quit the shelter of its harbours. There were no cruiser actions. A German minelayer sowing a minefield off Harwich was chased and sunk by a flotilla of destroyers led by the _Amphion_; and the _Amphion_ returning, was blown up on the German minefield. Otherwise silence unbroken by cannon brooded over the broad and narrow waters. But during that silence and from its first moment the sea-power of Great Britain ruled unchallenged throughout the world. Every German cruiser in foreign waters vanished into the immense spaces of the sea; every German merchant ship, from the earliest moment when the entry of Britain into the war became apparent, fled for neutral harbours. Seven out of eight, potential commerce destroyers, were bottled up without ever a shot being fired. German seaborne trade outside the Baltic ceased to exist from the night of August 4. On the other hand, after a few days of hesitation the swarming mercantile marine of Britain, encouraged by a Government insurance of no more than six per cent., began to put to sea; and even before the main armies had met in battle on the Continent, the whole vast ocean traffic of the British Empire was proceeding with the utmost activity. By the end of August the rate of insurance had already fallen to six per cent. and the Admiralty was able to announce that of the forty-two German liners from whom attacks on trade were to be apprehended, eleven were tied up unarmed in harbours of the United States watched outside territorial limits by British cruisers, six had taken refuge in other neutral harbours, where they were either