r the sea is but a fickle friend.

It had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some
nations to destruction--as we know. He--man or people--who, boasting of
long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the strength and cunning
of his right hand is a fool. The pride and trust of the nation in its
Navy so strangely mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a
particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is also
very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great
responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible,
imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes
offered to the deserving.

But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of
irritation. No recognition was thrust on it offensively, and, truth to
say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own
obscure merit. It had no consciousness. It had no words. It had no
time. To these busy men their work was but the ordinary labour of
earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like
the sun itself, the commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity
was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with
no spiritual lustre. They were everyday men. They were that, eminently.
When the great opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a
supreme call they received it with characteristic simplicity,
incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and,
as far as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic time
within the rigid rules of their professional conscience. And who can say
that they could have done better than this?

Such was their past both remote and near. It has been stubbornly
consistent, and as this consistency was based upon the character of men
fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure.
Such changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part
mechanical and affecting only the material conditions of that inbred
consistency. That men don't change is a profound truth. They don't
change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could
accomplish that miracle. It is enough for them to be infinitely
adaptable--as the last four years have abundantly proved.

III.

Thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with unshaken
confidence. Whether the hues of sun