STRAIN OF CONVOY WORK LESSENED

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 40, 17 February 1915, Page 7

STRAIN OF CONVOY WORK LESSENED

DEFENCE AGAINST THE BLOCKADE (Received February 17, 8.30 a.m.) LONDON, 16tb February. Mr. Churchill added that the great strain of distant convoy work in the early months of the war had now diminished, including the great convoy of sixty Australian ships, forty Canadian, and a regular flow of Indian convoys of forty or fifty vessels. Now we were to be the object of a kind of warfare never practised in civilised States. Submarines were to »iuk merchantmen at sight, without search

or parley; but it must not be supposed because the attack was extraordinary that a good defence cannot bo made. LOSSES LIKELY, BUT NO VITAL INJURY. He warned the public that losses would be incurred, but there would be no vital injury if traders acted in the spirit of the gallant captain of the Laertes. All losses could be covered by Government insurance. Germany cannot be allowed to adopt a "system of open piracy and murder while she was protected by the bulwarks of international instruments which she utterly repudiated and defied, and we, much to our detriment, respected. The House chuckled when Mr. Churchill recalled that the laws of ancient Rome did not provide for the crime of parricide, but the Judges were equal to the emergency. Some members were puzzled, and Mr. Asquith turned to Mr. Hobhouse and explained that the Judges sewed up the parricide in a sack with a dog a viper, and a cock, and pitched him into the Tiber. Mr. Churchill concluded by stating that British sea power increasingly dominates the general situation. In default of other favourable causes, this would alone decide the issue of the war. •