It is no new thing then for men of the merchant service to man their guns and fight their ships. And not for the first time has Britain mobilised all her maritime resources. Never before, however, in a fashion so far-reaching or so impressive. Her previous history is written over again but in larger characters. Never before have her merchant navies been called upon to support so stupendous an operation, to carry almost the whole weight of transport and supplies for millions of fighting men. Since ships are the railroads of the Allies; since without ships neither soldiers nor guns can reach the distant seats of war; since without them Britain herself cannot hope to sustain her life—ships and sailors have been and are, as they have been in the past, the first and last and utterly essential element.
None but a great maritime people, however powerful its fighting fleets, could have faced or upheld for a week the gigantic undertaking. We speak of an empire of thirteen million square miles, of four hundred millions of inhabitants. We should speak of it as an empire of ships and sailors, an empire of tonnage—20 millions of it—carrying the weight of half the world's goods, a voyaging empire, in everlasting motion on the seas, that in days of peace serves every race and country—
To give the poles the produce of the sun,
And knit the unsocial climates into one.
that unites in a close-wrought texture the whole fabric of civilisation, links island to island, continent to continent; a prodigious network of travel. The empire of ships, that has brought the East to meet the West, sought out the far and foreign lands; enabled China and India and the Isles to interchange ideas and gifts with Europe, is not the fleet of battleships but that other which, in times of peace, extended in a fashion no other instrument has ever rivalled, and enriched beyond arithmetic the intercourse and resources of mankind.
THE KEY-STONE OF THE ARCH
These are the men who sailed with Drake,
Masters and mates and crew:
These are the men, and the ways they take
Are the old ways through and through;
These are the men he knew.
The communications of the Great Alliance—it is their point of vulnerability—are sea communications, and if that key-stone slips
"Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch
Of the ranged Empire falls."