LAND & WATER 
May 4, 1916 
CONTRASTS IN SEA METHODS 
By Arthur Pollen 
THE naval developments of the last fortnight 
demonstrate the shifts and expedients a power 
inferior at sea is seeminfjy tom;jelled to adopt 
when it has neither the imagination nor .the 
resolution re<|uired for a direct effort to dispute an 
adverse command of the sea. They also illustrate how 
futile, in every essential of military result, these shifts 
and expedients must be. And in this respect they only 
repeat to us to-day lessons of which history gives us many 
examples. But in one respect they have produced what 
is almost a new phenomenon. 1 mean the open revolt of 
the neutral world against the methods by which a bellig- 
erent has aspired to the exercise of a real sea power 
without possessing the means of doing so in a manner 
consonant with the dictates of justice and humanity. 
The I'nited States has, perhaps wisely, limited its 
protest to forbidding further offences by torpedoing or 
shelling trading ships. ' The ground of the quarrel is 
precisely that in so doing Germany has been, and must 
continue to be, guilty of murder. But we should not 
lose sight of the fact that practically all her actions at 
sea are but variants of the same crime. Take, for 
instance, the fostering of revolt in Ireland. It is possible 
of course, that those responsible for sending the traitor 
Casement to the West Coast, and arming the handful of 
desperadoes who have been turning a few streets of Dublin 
into a hell, may have been foolish enough to have ex- 
pected their efforts to result in an effective rebellion 
against the British Crown. An effective rebellion would 
undoubtedly have introduced a change in the military 
situation of real value to the enemy. But it is almost 
inconceivable that so fatuous a hope could genuinely 
have been held. It seems more probable that the Sinn 
Feiners were backed simply to demonstrate the power of 
Germany to introduce fright fulness upon a scene hitherto 
, immune from her murderous intervention. 
Take again the raid on Lowestoft and the unhappy 
accidents by which " Russell " and two armed yachts 
have run upon mines in the Mediterranean. The bom- 
bardment of Lowestoft and Yarmouth had no other 
purpose than casual murder ; and the extension of the 
. practice of sowing mines — so assiduously cultivated in 
the North Sea — to the Mediterranean, is indistinguishable 
from a deliberate, though indiscriminate, effort at murder, 
because to one ship of war that runs the risk of fouling 
them, a dozen non-combatant ships must face this bar- 
barous and inhuman peril day after day. In the North 
. Sea, as we know, the ratio of merchant ships to war 
ships that have been blown up by mines, is something 
like twenty to one. And it is the merchant ship that is least 
well equipped for protecting its personnel when such 
disasters occur. Thus, all Germany's naval action — - 
whether by her most powerful warships, or by the craft 
or devices devoted particularly to the destniction of 
commerce — is marked by murder being its only object 
and its only method. 
The American Crisis 
Incalculably the most momentous question of the day 
is how Germany >:^ill act in face of the American protest 
against the continued indulgence of this homicidal mania. 
For a fortnight we have been entirely without news. Presi- 
dent Wilson asked for an immediate reply, and it would 
seem as if some sort of reply could not be much longer 
delayed. The enemy's difficulty in sending one does not, 
as we all know, lie in formulating the policy that is wisest 
for himself, but in presenting that policy in a manner that 
will not be destructi\e of national discipline. Were there 
no difficulty on this latter point, Berlin would surrender 
to Washington without hesitation or delay. The policy 
of so doing is obvious, because the \ery remote mihtary 
advantages lost by renouncing the attack on commerce 
are outweighed many times over by the dangers that 
must follow if America is driven into belligerency. It 
is surely no over statement to speak of the military effect 
of commerce destruction being both indirect and unim- 
portant. As a sole method of making naval war, cam- 
paign after campaign has shown its futility. In none of 
our wars — neither tho.se with France in the seventeenth 
or eighteenth centuries, nor in that with America in 
1812 — have the depredations on our commerce proved 
at all serious, though in many of these wars they were 
carried out on a colossal scale. The German submarine 
campaign has so far not approached the effectiveness 
either of the French or of the American privateers. 
Nor would it be more than a passing embarrassment, 
if it were not for a change in naval conditioiis, that few 
if any realised before the war broke out. In previous 
wars the protection of commerce imposed extraordinary 
burdens upon the fighting navy. To-day it is the fight- 
ing navy that has imposed extraordinary burdens upon 
commerce. It is the British merchant fleet that has been 
comjielled to find transports for our armies, and an almost 
endless tale of supply ships, both for the navy itself 
and for the maintenance of the forces employed in so 
many places overseas. Compared with the tonnage that 
naval and military requirements have withdrawn from 
civil uses, the tonnage lost by enemy action is almost 
trivial, and it is this fact that lends point to what I 
urged last week, viz., that the building of merchant 
ships must be put on the same basis as naval ship-build- 
ing or the making of munitions. It is a simple fact that, 
in the general devotion of ail private property to public 
war purposes, the distinction between naval and merchant 
shipping has vanished. Apart from building new ships, 
much more can be done to lessen the demand on shipping, 
and to expedite the clearing of the ships in use. 
It is idle to suppose that we have arrived anywhere near 
the useful limits to which imports can be restricted, and 
voluntary effort can supplement State action in this 
respect to a very notable degree. Nor can it be doubted 
that in a great many ports — if not in all— a vigorous 
reform in the employment of labour, and the wise intro- 
duction of fresh labour, would result in ships being 
cleared and reloaded with far greater expedition than is 
now the rule. There are indeed many authorities who 
go so far as to say that if the labour devoted to building 
new ships could be turned to making existing ships more 
useful by shortening their periods of idleness in harbour, a 
tonnage, now useless, would be made available far exceed- 
ing that which any building effort could supply. Which- 
ever way then that the problem is looked at, it is cleariy 
obvious that no commerce destruction on any scale 
hitherto experienced, is likely to bring Germany that 
weakening of British military power which is its pro- 
fessed object. 
MultipHcation of Submarines" 
•If then Germany hesitates as a mere matter of policv, 
and apart from internal questions, whether to yield 
to America or not, it must be because she has hopes of 
very greatly increasing the efficiency of her attack. 
It ^\as repeated from some German source last week that 
the enemy had built and equipped over 200 submarines. 
I am not concerned at this moment to dispute the 
credibility of this statement. It is more to the point 
that even if 200 submarines were ready for the campaign, 
It would not at all follow that the campaign's efficiency 
would gain either proportionately or at all, A.nd the 
reason is not really very recondite. It is to be found in 
the fact that a submarine cannot work with other ?ub- 
marincs in the sense in which surface ships can work 
together. 
If you add a squadron of six battleships to a fleet of 
twelve, you have manifestly increased the power of that 
squadron by 50 per cent. You have increased it because 
battle squadrons are an organised force, and all additions 
to that force, from the nature of things, contribute to a 
cumulative result. But the submarine is never part of 
an organised force. It is at most a mobile danger point. 
By multiplying submarines, you multiply danger points. 
But If the ships that have "to oass the danger points 
