inconveniences caused by our blockade is your contribution to the
cause--your slap on the back, signifying:--Go in and win!

"Open your mails? Yes, I'm afraid we do. And we find a good lot inside
them! Do you know, there is a great warehouse in London filled from
top to bottom with rubber, and nickel, and other commodities for which
the Hun longs, disguised as all sorts of things--rubber fruit, for
instance--taken from the most innocent-looking parcels--all dispatched
from the United States to neutral countries in touch with Germany?
But we are most punctilious about it all. Every single article retains
its original address-label, and will be forwarded direct to its proper
consignee, directly the war is over. Can you beat that?

"Would we welcome Intervention? My dear sir, is it likely? Supposing
_you_ had been caught entirely unprepared, and had been sticking your
toes in for two years--fighting for time and playing a poor hand
pretty well--and were at last ready to hit back, and hit back, until
you had rendered your opponent incapable of further outrage, and were
in a fair way to fix this war so that it never could happen
again--would you welcome Mediation, or offers of Mediation? I think
not.

"Submarines? We aren't attaching _too_ much importance to submarine
frightfulness. It is true we have lost a number of merchant ships, and
that a number of innocent lives have been sacrificed. But let us put
our hearts in the background for the present and look at the matter
from the economic and military point of view. We have lost, in
twenty-seven months, about one tenth of our original merchant fleet.
Against that you have to set the fact that we have been steadily
building new merchant ships during the same period. The dead loss of