the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand
miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong
right arm. But it has no thievish fingers.

The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been
conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the
fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents,
as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as
with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat
properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to
trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well
as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own
lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without
the safeguard of the Royal Navy.

These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real
League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up
any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its
enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more
than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know
as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as
many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though
India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So
much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British
Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United
States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way.
The Navy is "The Silent Service."

PART II

THE GREAT WAR

(1914-1918)

CHAPTER XXII

THE HANDY MAN

We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something
about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or
a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet or a commander-in-chief, a
blue-jacket or a Royal Marine ("soldier and sailor too"). But we must
not enter the Age of Steam and Steel without taking another look at
him, if only to see what a great part he plays in our lives and
liberties by keeping the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies.
Without the Handy Man of the Royal Navy the Merchant Service could not
live a day, the Canadian Army could not have joined the other British
armies at the front, and the Empire itself would be all parts and no
whole, because divided, not united, by the Seven Se