And now again the depths are stirred. The development of the submarine
attack has set us a new and stern task, and we are "straitened till it
be accomplished." The great battle-ships seem almost to have left the
stage. In less than three months, 626,000 tons of British, neutral and
allied shipping have been destroyed. Since the beginning of the war
we--Great Britain--have lost over two million tons of shipping, and our
Allies and the neutrals have lost almost as much. There is a certain
shortage of food in Great Britain, and a shortage of many other things
besides. Writing about the middle of February, an important German
newspaper raised a shout of jubilation. "The whole sea was as if swept
clean at one blow"--by the announcement of the intensified "blockade" of
the first of February. So the German scribe. But again the facts shoot
up, hard and irreducible, through the sea of comment. While the German
newspapers were shouting to each other, the sea was so far from being
"swept clean," that twelve thousand ships had actually passed in and out
of British ports in the first eighteen days of the "blockade." And at
any moment during those days, at least 3,000 ships could have been found
traversing the "danger zone," which the Germans imagined themselves to
have barred. One is reminded of the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ last year,
after the Zeppelin raid in January 1916. "English industry lies in
ruins," said that astonishing print. "The sea has been swept clean,"
says one of its brethren now. Yet all the while, there, in the danger
zone, whenever, by day or night, one turns one's thoughts to it, are the
three thousand ships; and there in the course of a fortnight, are the
twelve thousand ships going and coming.

Yet all the same, as I have said before, there is danger and there is
anxiety. The neutrals--save America--have been intimidated; they are
keeping their ships in harbour; and to do without their tonnage is a