English innate political conceptions of popular representative
government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail in North America
from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the
Pacific? Because the command of the sea at the decisive era belonged to
Great Britain." We have seen that the decisive era was when Napoleon's
mouth watered for Louisiana, and when England took her stand behind the
Monroe Doctrine.

Admiral Sims said in the second installment of his narrative The Victory
at Sea, published in The World's Work for October, 1919, at page 619:
"... Let us suppose for a moment that an earthquake, or some other great
natural disturbance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa Flow. The
world would then have been at Germany's mercy and all the destroyers the
Allies could have put upon the sea would have availed them nothing, for
the German battleships and battle cruisers could have sunk them or driven
them into their ports. Then Allied commerce would have been the prey, not
only of the submarines, which could have operated with the utmost
freedom, but of the German surface craft as well. In a few weeks the
British food supplies would have been exhausted. There would have been an
early end to the soldiers and munitions which Britain was constantly
sending to France. The United States could have sent no forces to the
Western front, and the result would have been the surrender which the
Allies themselves, in the spring of 1917, regarded as a not remote
possibility. America would then have been compelled to face the German
power alone, and to face it long before we had had an opportunity to
assemble our resources and equip our armies. The world was preserved from
all these calamities because the destroyer and the convoy solved the
problem of the submarines, and because back of these agencies of victory
lay Admiral Beatty's squadrons, holding at arm's length the German
surface ships while these comparatively fragile craft were saving the