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 Admiral Beatty's squadrons, holding at arm's length the German surface ships while these comparatively fragile craft were saving the liberties of the world." Yes.