The enemy, he said, meant by this
atrocity to frighten our sailors away from the sea.
"What has happened?" he goes on to ask. "Never at any time in peace have
sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a readiness to step
again into a ship."
Which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. I should
like to know at what time of history the English Merchant Service, the
great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer the call. Noticed or
unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have answered invariably the call
to do their work, the very conditions of which made them what they are.
They have always served the nation's needs through their own invariable
fidelity to the demands of their special life; but with the development
and complexity of material civilisation they grew less prominent to the
nation's eye among all the vast schemes of national industry. Never was
the need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day.
And those inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much of the
national welfare have answered it without dismay, facing risk without
glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition which the speech of
the statesman denies to them at the very moment when he thinks fit to
praise their courage .
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