ingle month the vessels of the British Navy steamed over one
million miles; German trading ships have been swept from the seas and
the U-boat menace is but a menace still. Meantime, British shipyards
are busy night and day; a million tons of craft for the Navy alone
were launched during the first year of the war, and the programme of
new naval construction for 1917 runs into hundreds of thousands of
tons. In peace time the building of new merchant ships was just under
2,000,000 tons yearly, and despite the shortage of labour and
difficulty of obtaining materials, 1,100,000 tons will be built by
the end of 1917, and 4,000,000 tons in 1918.

The British Mercantile Marine (to whom be all honour!) has
transported during the war, the following:--

13,000,000 men,
25,000,000 tons of war material,
1,000,000 sick and wounded,
51,000,000 tons of coal and oil fuel,
2,000,000 horses and mules,
100,000,000 hundredweights of wheat,
7,000,000 tons of iron ore,

and, beyond this, has exported goods to the value of L500,000,000.

Here ends my list of figures and here this chapter should end also;
but, before I close, I would give, very briefly and in plain
language, three examples of the spirit animating this Empire that
to-day is greater and more worthy by reason of these last three
blood-smirched years.

No. I

There came from Australia at his own expense, one Thomas Harper, an
old man of seventy-four, to help in a British munition factory. He
laboured hard, doing the work of two men, and more than once fainted
with fatigue, but refused to go home because he "couldn't rest while
he thought his country needed shells."

No. II

There is a certain small fishing village whose men were nearly all
employed in fishing for mines. But there dawned a black day when news
came that forty of their number had perished together and in the same
hour. Now surely one would think that this little village, plunged in
grief for the loss of its young manhood, had done its duty to the
uttermost for Britain and their fellows! But these heroic fisher-folk
thought otherwise, for immediately fifty of the remaining
seventy-five men (all over military age) volunteered and sailed away
to fill the places of their dead sons and brothers.

No. III

Glancing idly through a local magazine some days since, my eye was
arrested by this:

"In proud and loving memor