of the Kaiser and all his works, it
would not stop their evil mouths. Not for them am I here setting forth
a part of what England did; it is for the convenience of the honest
American, who does want to know, that my collection of facts is made
from the various sources which he may not have the time or the means to
look up for himself. For his benefit I add some particulars concerning
the British Navy which kept the Kaiser out of our front yard.

Admiral Mahan said in his book--and he was an American of whose
knowledge and wisdom Congress seems to have known nothing and
cared less--"Why do 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 A