There was veritable amazement in the House of Commons when it was informed of what Lord Fisher and Lord Strathcona had done with the _Anglo-Persian_. Their work narrowly escaped undoing. Lord Fisher himself described, in September 1919, the opposition he met with, even among his colleagues. "I was dubbed 'an oil maniac' when I was at the Admiralty in 1885. Lord Ripon, the First Lord, sent for me and told me I was called a Radical enthusiast and nicknamed 'Gambetta,' and said he meant to make me a member of the Board of Admiralty. I told him all the rest of the Board would leave. He saw me a week after and confessed it was so; but, thank God! I was spared to be Director of Naval Ordnance instead." Lord Fisher experienced the same difficulties when he wished to equip the British Navy with submarines. It is to him, and to the Bethlehem Steel Works (United States), that the Allies owed the prompt completion of the special type of submarines which "went, unconvoyed from America to the Dardanelles and acted there prodigiously." A few of these submarines which succeeded in passing through the wire nets of Chanak-Nagara, for a long time controlled the Sea of Marmora and prevented the Turks from taking supplies by sea to their fortifications on the Straits. Oil supremacy and naval supremacy go hand-in-hand. When he wished to give his country empire over oil, Lord Fisher's principal object was to preserve her dominion over the seas. For that fleet will be victorious which has at its disposal the most abundant sources of oil. Ships using oil have driven out those burning coal, just as the latter replaced sailing ships. When we compare the results obtained by France and by Britain, on whose soil it seems that no deposits of mineral oil have yet been discovered (a fact which rendered Lord Fisher's task none the easier); and when we see Britain mistress of nearly all the oil remaining in the world, we stand confounded with admiration before the genius of those to whom she owes such an empire. British Oil Policy