WHAT GREAT BRITAIN IS DOING 



201 



the Russian and the French coasts in the 

 rear of the Russian and French armies ; 

 she would have shut oft all the French 

 oversea trade ; she would have captured 

 or destroyed or driven into port practi- 

 cally the whole of the French and Rus- 

 sian merchant marine ; France would 

 have been blockaded ; with her chief in- 

 dustrial provinces in German occupation, 

 she would have been prevented from im- 

 porting any food, any raw material, any 

 munitions ; while Germany would have 

 been free to draw on the resources of the 

 entire world. In less than six months, 

 for all her magnificent valor, France 

 could not but have succumbed. 



That was the Prussian calculation and 

 it was a perfectly sound one ; but it fell 

 like a house of cards when Great Britain 

 intervened. Instead of securing at once 

 the command of the sea. Germany lost it 

 at once. Everything that she had hoped 

 to inflict upon France and Russia by 

 maritime supremacy was in fact inflicted 

 upon herself. What has made it possible 

 for us to land some 2,000,000 men on the 

 Continent of Europe, equipped with every 

 single item in the infinitely varied para- 

 phernalia of modern war? 



AN UBIQUITOUS AXD UNSHAKABLE POWER 



How have we been able to conduct 

 simultaneous campaigns in Egypt, East 

 Africa, the Cameroons, Southwest Af- 

 rica, the Balkans, and the Pacific ? There 

 are Russian troops fighting at this mo- 

 ment in France and round Saloniki. How 

 did they get there ? 



From all the ends of the earth British 

 subjects in hundreds upon hundreds of 

 thousands have flocked to the central 

 battlefield. What agency convoyed them ? 

 What power protected them ? 



The United States has built up with 

 the Allies a trade that throws all previous 

 American experience of foreign com- 

 merce into the shade. But how many 

 Americans, I wonder, stop to ask them- 

 selves how it is that this vast volume of 

 merchandise has crossed the Atlantic in 

 the midst of the greatest war in all his- 

 tory almost as swiftly and securely as in 

 the days of profoundest peace? 



One by one Germany's colonies have 

 been torn from her grasp — those over- 



sea possessions the children of so many 

 hopes, the scenes of such unremitting 

 labor, the nursing plots of such vast am- 

 bitions ; and not a single blow has been 

 struck in defense of them by the father- 

 land itself. One and all have had to rely 

 on their own isolated and local efforts. 



They have looked in vain to Germany. 

 Germany — paralyzed by what power? 

 held down in helplessness by what mys- 

 terious spell? — has impotently watched 

 her beginnings of a world-wide empire 

 shattered beneath her eyes. 



How is it, again, that the Belgian army 

 has been rearmed, reconstituted, and re- 

 equipped? How is it that the Serbian 

 forces have similarly been rescued and 

 remade ? How is it that Russia has been 

 remunitioned, that Italy has been enabled 

 to overcome her natural deficiencies, that 

 France, in spite of the loss of some of 

 her most highly industrialized districts, 

 is still, for purposes both of war and of 

 commerce, a great manufacturing nation, 

 and that all the Allies can import freely 

 what they need from the neutral world? 



To what ubiquitous and unshakable 

 power, stretching from Iceland to the 

 Equator and back again, guarding all 

 oceans, girdling the whole world, are 

 these miracles due? They are due to 

 just one thing — the British navy. Be- 

 cause of the British navy, Germany is a 

 beleagured garrison, her strength stead- 

 ily, ceaselessly sapping away ; her people 

 languishing physically under the stress of 

 the blockade, and financially and econom- 

 ically under the total loss of her foreign 

 trade. 



IT SUPPORTS THE EDIFICE 



Defeat the British navy and the war is 

 over in six weeks. There lies Germany's 

 nearest road, not only to peace, but to 

 full and final victory. Take away from 

 the Grand Alliance the support of the 

 British navy and the whole structure col- 

 lapses into nothingness. 



Some Americans may have wondered 

 why Prussia last fall should have begun 

 to squeal for peace and why, on failing 

 to get it, she should have renewed, even 

 in face of the almost certain prospect of 

 uniting nearly the whole neutral world 

 against her, her campaign of murder on 

 the hisdi seas. 



