ables here, a coterie of journalists, army officers, and ousted politicians there, may rail and lament at large. But the country continues to chant its Lloyd Georgic; the Empire does the same; our Allies without exception furnish an applauding chorus. More than any other man among us he typifies the spirit and aims and stimulates the efforts of the great crusade. A nation is more than the sum of its interests and sections. It is bigger and it is better; and Mr. Lloyd George, like Colonel Roosevelt, can ignore the factions and the guerrillas while he holds the hearts of the great mass of his fellow countrymen and while their hopes and trust are centred in him. He is more powerful without a party that is organized to support him than is any other statesman with one. He is more powerful because he has the instinctive confidence of the average man. There are groups beyond counting who criticize and grumble, intrigue and obstruct. But the nation, the silent unorganized mass, the plain people on whom party ties sit lightly at any time, and who to-day are utterly unaffected by them, the men and women who merely ask for leadership- these are behind the Prime Minister and will stay behind him to the end. That, indeed, is the supreme paradox of his position. He commands the whole but not the parts. The sentiment for him among the rank and file of the British people is not one whit more enthusiastic than it is in Canada or America or France. No one, not Chamberlain or Chatham, has ever had the confidence of the Empire as he has. Among our Allies he is accepted as the incarnation of British democracy. His career and his personality have invested him with a representative character abroad such as no other Briton even approaches. Something radiates from Mr. Lloyd

George which is felt as a bond of genuine union throughout the length and breadth of all the nations whom the League of Liberty has joined together. Poll the Empire and all our Allies for the man who since the beginning of the war has done most to express and sustain the sentiment and ideals of the anti-German confederacy, and there would be an overwhelming vote for the British Prime Minister.

But the problem remains, your problem and mine. It is how to strengthen the hands of the best man we possess to carry the nation through to victory. We have seen in the Maurice affair and the activities of Sir Hedley Le Bas from how many quarters and with what questionable weapons he is assailed. We have seen, too, how triumphantly he can take care of himself. It is altogether in vain that people prove minutely and irrefutably that the Premier, while seeming to meet, really skated round the specific issues raised by General Maurice's letter. It is in vain, first, because the magnitude of his Parliamentary triumph was by far the most impressive feature in the whole episode; secondly, because a literal accuracy of statement is what a tolerant public as little expects from the Prime Minister as from the Foreign Secretary; and thirdly, because with all his obvious and admitted weaknesses, his vulnerability, and the shortcomings of his Cabinet, Mr. Lloyd George has more of the stuff of leadership in him than any other man whom these crucial days have unearthed. It is in vain, once more, that the Spectator adduces three tests, all of them relating to Ireland, by which it undertakes to regulate its future treatment of the Prime Minister. The average man, I fear, is apt to comment that those who, in the face of Germany's

power in the West and of her conquests in the East, can persist in looking at this war from the angle of Ireland, and in making Irish policy the touchstone of their attitude towards the British Government, are scarcely in a position to criticize anybody's obliqueness of vision. It is astonishing with what energy clever people will try to take up every standpoint in regard to the war except the simple and inclusive one of victory.

That good sense which is the saving clause of our political character keeps the British public from wandering far down such by-paths as these. Without particularly admiring or even understanding Mr. Lloyd George's recent policies in Ireland it refuses to make the egregious error in proportion of elevating them into a final touchstone of his conduct of the war. It supports him because it is satisfied that he has nothing in his mind but the ways and means of winning the war and that a government of which he is the head offers us our best chance of victory. When it is told that his administration is the creature of the press, and of the Northcliffe press at that, it replies fairly enough that Mr. Lloyd George enjoys throughout the kingdom an amount of nonpartisan backing in the newspapers such as no British statesman has ever before commanded. When, again, it is assured that the Prime Minister has 'done nothing,' it turns to the dwindling devastation of the U-boats, to the figures of our agricultural production, to the success of the rationing scheme, to our aeroplane construction, to the perfecting of a science of man-power, to the unity of command that has at last been brought about at the front, to the reorganized Admiralty and its revived offensive spirit, to our immense and still expanding effort in munitions and finance. Nor

is the popular memory so short as the four-shillings-an-inch school of politicians would like to think. What happened in December 1916 had to happen if our political leadership was ever to reflect the national energy and the national resolution; and there is hardly anyone, I believe, in the country or in the Empire or among our Allies or in our armies and fleets who would wish to see our management of the war revert to the hands that relinquished it eighteen months ago. The country then was troubled and uncertain. People felt that there was a lack of driving power, that the prosecution of the war had fallen into a rut, and that we were drifting in directions which may not have spelled disaster but certainly did not spell victory. To-day that fatal suspicion of ineffectiveness at the helm has pretty well vanished. The country knows that it has not had since the war began and is not likely to have while it lasts any Prime Minister who at once and so powerfully interprets and fortifies the temper of the British democracy as Mr. Lloyd George. It realizes that at the head of its affairs there is now an elemental fighter; and for the sake of retaining such an asset it is prepared to make many allowances, to overlook many shortcomings, and to leave the Premier with a free hand in the disposal of the human material that surrounds and at times encumbers him. The simple principle on which the nation instinctively acts is that, having vested Mr. Lloyd George with the supreme power, his responsibility for appointments and dismissals must be absolute and unfettered.

There has been some talk of late, much of it perhaps premature, to the effect that a 'regular Opposition' has really come into being. If so, it has only thus far succeeded in showing

FOR Some weeks before it achieved its first attack, the expedition was prepared to the last detail, and was waiting on wind and weather. Twice the squadron and the flotillas started, and, the conditions turning against them, put back again. Thus once and twice the volunteers, wrought to the pitch of action, were balked, and thrice they must begin afresh. And during the period of suspense the men were kept in the ships and were not permitted to send letters on shore.

And for weeks before the expedition was assembled and the call for volunteers was given, preparations were proceeding. Hundreds of officers and men were secretly engaged in carrying into execution the elaborate and ingenious scheme devised by Vice-Admiral Roger (now Sir Roger) Keyes, Admiral of the Dover Patrol. H.M.S. Vindictive, Captain Alfred F. B. Carpenter, was equipped for inshore fighting; five old cruisers, Intrepid, Iphigenia, Thetis, Sirius, and Brilliant were reconstructed internally, filled with wet cement and fitted with explosive charges, leaving the engine rooms practicable; certain flotillas of destroyers and motor craft were prepared and equipped. Monitors were attached, and two ferry boats from the Mersey, Iris and Daffodil, were told off to attend Vindictive. Here is but a brief indication of a considerable naval operation, whose execution demanded strict secrecy, absolute accuracy in every detail, and perfect organization.

The problem which Sir Roger

Keyes set himself to solve was how to block two of the main bases of the German Flanders Submarine Flotilla. These are Zeebrugge and Ostend. Both ports are connected with Bruges by canal, and Bruges is connected with Germany by rail. Supplies and ammunition can thus be sent from Germany by inland routes to Zeebrugge and Ostend. It is possible to send the parts of submarines by these routes, to be put together in the canal docks opening upon the two harbors respectively. were thus two objects to be accomplished in the case of each port, if possible by the same operation. One was to block the canal entrances; the other was to block the harbors themselves.

There

It is a principle of naval warfare that ships cannot successfully attack forts. For the ship offers a pain target to the land gunner, whose weapon is invisible from the sea and is defended by earthworks. Land forts are vulnerable to the plunging fire of howitzers, but a ship makes an unstable platform for howitzers, and she is liable to be hit ere she can bring them into action. Nevertheless, Sir Roger Keyes proposed to attack two harbors, both of which are defended by many batteries of the most powerful guns.

There were other obstacles to consider. There was the possibility of running into mine fields; there was the chance of submarine attack; there was the risk of being attacked by enemy squadrons; there was the

unknown quantity of what enemy craft might be lying in the harbors.

The admiral must therefore contemplate the certainty of exposing the ships and small craft to heavy fire from the land batteries; together with the hazard of mine, submarine, and surface attack; and the risk of weather conditions changing at the last moment. There were also the extraordinary difficulties of approaching a hostile coast, beset with shoals, in the dark and deprived of all lights, marks, and beacons. If the expedition deviated from its course it would be a failure, probably accompanied by frightful loss.

How did Sir Roger Keyes provide against these contingencies? He proposed partially to neutralize the effect of heavy gun-fire from the land. by the use of a thick smoke screen, devised by Wing-Commander Brock, R.N.A.S., under cover of which the monitors might conduct a bombardment of the shore, while the vessels took up their positions. For this purpose he must choose a night when the wind blew towards the coast, and pray that it might hold. The main object being to block the harbor, the admiral, in the case of Zeebrugge, designed to divert the attention of the enemy from the approach of the blocking ships by a surprise attack on the mole itself. One part of the attack on the mole was to be conducted by a landing party, the other part was to be the blowing up by a submarine of the railway bridge connecting the solid concrete of the mole with the mainland. During the attack, the blocking ships were to steam in, the charges to sink them were to be fired, and the officers and men were to get away in the ships' boats and in the accompanying small motor craft.

A more desperate adventure was seldom planned. The French, with

their customary generous appreciation, say never. It could not have been planned at all in default of the absolute confidence of the admiral in the skill, seamanship, and resource of the officers and men under his command. Apart from all external risks, the success of the operation depended upon the accuracy with which each successive place was timed, which again depended upon the perfect working together of the whole squadron.

On the night of April 22-23 wind, weather, and tide were in accord; and the expedition assembled. The details of the organization and distribution of the various vessels are not, of course, available in time of war, but the general course of events has been made clear by the official and authorized accounts of the affair.

Two blocking ships, the cruisers Sirius and Brilliant, accompanied by small craft, were detached to Ostend. The night was quite dark, with a breeze blowing towards the Belgian coast, and a lop of sea. There are two channels, running through the shoals, leading to Ostend harbor; one runs directly into the harbor, the other curves westward. The slightest deviation from her course runs a ship aground. The Ostend party, under the command of Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.M.G., proceeded behind a smoke screen. Two motor boats had gone ahead, had found the channel, and were marking the course with flares, visible to the two blocking ships, but invisible from the shore. At this moment the wind shifted, and blew the smoke seaward, so that the flares were seen by the enemy on shore. Instantly the shore batteries. opened fire and sank the two motor boats, extinguishing the flares. The direction being thus lost, the two blocking ships ran aground and were