Since writing the article on the meaning of the great battle-ship cruise, news comes that England has been stirred to her very depth on learning that Germany is building ships at a rate which England supposed impossible. Wm. T. Stead in expressing it quotes the scripture: “There was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour;” but he says never had there been such silence in the House of Commons as when Premier Asquith closed his navy speech. It was a sudden awakening of the hare to the fact that the despised tortoise was forging ahead. And now the British ministry instead of feeling that it is impossible for them to obtain money for the building of four Dreadnaughts are meeting a general desire to compel them to build eight. Ministers feel that they have the liberty to begin four and to assume the authorization to order materials to build four more. And Mr. Stead declares that the talk is not fanfaronade, but a genuine, well-founded alarm, out of which will come a definite plan to adopt as a standard an irreducible minimum or formula of two ships for Germany’s one; and yet this faces them: that in 1912 the Germans will have seventeen battle-ships of the Dreadnaught class, and England, instead of having thirty-four will have only twenty-two. It is also admitted that Germany is ahead in gun mountings, and gun mountings dominate speed of construction. Germany can build as fast as the British. The question now will be for funds, and this burden will rest upon the backs of the people. It is now reported that Germany is laying down eight Dreadnaughts this year.