In doing so, it mentioned that except when the enemy has means of knowing how a submarine is destroyed it is not the Admiralty practice to announce the destruction.
As, however, this particularly brilliant feat was performed under the eyes of the Germans on the Belgian coast there was no reason for withholding the report.
It has never been publicly stated what plans the Admiralty has adopted for destroying the enemy's submarines, but it is known that many have been destroyed, and it is believed that the British authorities are satisfied with the work that is going on.
Many of the German under sea boats have been destroyed, and the Germans are completely mystified over the loss. It has been discovered that Germany has now 58 submarines, and that of these she has 30 in the Baltic.
The majority, it is to be observed, are kept in the Baltic. According to the German boast of some months ago, Germany was to have by the end of the present year somewhere about 90 submarines, as all her yards were engaged in building them and Krupp's Essen works were also taking part in the programme.
The destruction of submarines would seem to have been keeping pace with the construction, so that not a few Germans in high places have been asking whether the game of blockading Britain is worth the candle.
• The Queen Carnival has run its course, and, if exhausted, we are triumphant. Dunedin, characterised by envious northerners as a gloomy city of close fisted Scotsmen, has provided largesse in a measure exceeding anticipations.
Our good friends, the struggling farmers of Otago, have found a sufficient surplus to lift a Country Queen to the top of the poll. As a community we may be a little ashamed of our methods, but these are done with - shed like an old garment - and there is the money, anything up to 150,000 in good coin of the realm.
Assuredly it will go far by way of atonement. After all these weeks of carnival, pantomime, and harlequinade we shall again compose our features. The head of the house will be able to get a meal in his own home.
There will be a return to household duties and domesticity. No more will retiring ladies who never sold a sixpenn'orth of anything in their lives before hold the fort daily at the Stock Exchange, dispensing, to the manner born, everything eatable under the sun and no less of the uneatable.
To have seen the shedding of self consciousness that has permitted the most circumspect and relentless of church going citizens to sell fish in the forum is to have had a glad hour. Have we been touched by the gambling spirit?
Have we noticed anything of that pernicious practice known as raffling? Have we become the possessors, in any entirely unpremeditated and extraordinary way, of such things as raffle tickets?
Has any such token brought us a prize - a suite of furniture, may be, or a ton of coal, and did we promptly obey a pulpit exhortation to return these tainted trophies of our guilty dissipation?
These are questions which each must answer in solitary communion with his own conscience. Happy they who can cry: ''Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.''
Not too soon is the carnival ended. Dunedin wearing the motley so easily, so gaily, has been a surprise. - Civis.
- ODT, 28.8.1915
