Nothing could better stigmatize the epidemic of Self-Sufficiency which, in the writer's deliberate judgment, is primarily responsible for British failures in the war thus far. _There has been too much congratulation and self-congratulation on the sang-froid with which John Bull can take punishment_. He is a mighty gladiator, but cheery comfort from his seconds between rounds has failed on many an occasion to prevent a champion pugilist from being knocked out. It is not that England is _incapable_ of defeating Germany. It is that she seems _unwilling_ to do so by throwing into the balance every atom of strength for which that prodigious task calls. For at least a decade before 1914 Britain's political ostriches, disarmament-mongers, professional pacifists and pro-Germans declined to recognize the German danger even when it was approaching with strides so brazen that almost the blind could see. They preferred the "valor of ignorance," thought Ballin and Harnack instead of Tirpitz and Bernhardi typified Modern Germany, continued to revel in the bliss of contemptuous self-confidence, and attempted to parley with a tiger which was crouching for the attack. I enter a modest claim to have done my own little share for eight years in the futile work of arousing Britain to the Teuton peril. I refer merely to my work at Berlin, in reporting military and naval developments--"Germany laid all her cards on the table," as Admiral von Tirpitz once said to me. When the crash came, Englishmen pinned their faith to their history. They were no match for "forty years of preparations," of course; but they always "started late" and "muddled through" their wars. The Crimea began in terror and ended in triumph. The South African affair was the same sort of thing. War with Germany would be no different. The race which had finished off Napoleon need have no qualms in tackling his pinchbeck successor. Britons admit that a year of war has dissipated nearly all their comfortable illusions, but signs are still wanting that there is nation-wide, deep-seated realization of the immensity of the ordeal and the dimensions of the sacrifices yet to be faced. On December 8, 1915, when the war was sixteen months old, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford wrote this letter to _The Times_: