The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1914. THE NORTH SEA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 300, 17 December 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1914. THE NORTH SEA.

The news which we .publish to-day regarding the shelling of a number of English coastal towns in the North Sea is what we have for a long time expected, and is certainly nothing to be alarmed at: quite the contrary, in fact'. It would be supreme folly to suppose that the great and powerful fleets which the British Navy have so successfully bottled up in Kiel all this long time, while our own ships have swept the wide seas of German mauraders, could lie quiet for all time. Britain has but held them closely to their kennel until it suited the Navy to give them an opportunity to get out, and it is, from many points of. view, the best thing that? could have happened. Other coincident movements now made by Germany are suggestive of the desperate vindictiveness of trapped rats. These Prussian slaughtermen may—and pro. bably will—before this horrid war concludes, perpetrate other great barbaric acts and add to the mountain of shame which overshadows a great people, but their end is inevitable. As to the details of what appears to have been a naval engagement on a minor scale off the Yorkshire coast, we have no doubt whatever but that it will be found that the British Navy has done its duty well and nobly. The coast line of the British Isles, let it be remembered, is a pretty long one, and the stretch of water to be guarded is much more considerable than the ordinary reader takes the trouble to realise, and even with the great number of ships which the British Admiralty lias at its command, it is a moral impossibility to be in all places at once. If. as undoubtedly happened a few days ago, a British submarine could successfully evade three lines of mines and enter the Dardanelles, and after destroying a Turkish battleship make a successful escape without injury, we must certainly expect feats more or less similar to be at least attempted by the Germans. That they have not succeeded in countless enterprises of such a nature, recorded and unrecorded, is again to the credit of our Navy.