Part 11 (2/2)

As regards s.h.i.+ps, Britain has already placed six hundred vessels at the disposal of France and four hundred have been lent to Italy, the combined tonnage of these thousand s.h.i.+ps being estimated at two million.

Then, despite her drafts to Army and Navy she has still a million men employed in her coal mines and is supplying coal to Italy, France and Russia. Moreover, she is sending to France one quarter of her total production of steel, munitions of all kinds to Russia and guns and gunners to Italy.

As for her Navy--the German battle squadrons lie inactive, while in one single month the vessels of the British Navy steamed over one million miles; German trading s.h.i.+ps have been swept from the seas and the U-boat menace is but a menace still. Meantime, British s.h.i.+pyards 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 500,000,000.

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 sh.e.l.ls.”

No. II

There is a certain small fis.h.i.+ng village whose men were nearly all employed in fis.h.i.+ng 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 memory of our loved and loving son ... who fell in France ... with his only brother, 'On Higher Service.' There is no death.”

Thus then I conclude my list of facts and figures, a record of achievement such as this world has never known before, a record to be proud of, because it is the outward and visible sign of a people strong, virile, abounding in energy, but above all, a people clean of soul to whom Right and Justice are worth fighting for, suffering for, labouring for. It is the sign of a people which is willing to endure much for its ideals that the world may be a better world, wherein those who shall come hereafter may reap, in peace and contentment, the harvest this generation has sowed in sorrow, anguish and great travail.

THE END

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