, and even more after the
critical but indecisive conflict of August 10, then it is legitimate, as
Togo triumphantly showed, to regard the situation so established as so
far equivalent to a temporary command of the sea that military
operations, involving the security of oversea transit and the continuity
of oversea supply, might be undertaken with no greater risk than is
always inseparable from a vigorous initiative in war. But had the
Russian naval commanders been inspired--as, perhaps, the ill-fated
Makaroff alone was--with a genuine _animus pugnandi_, they might have
perceived that their one chance of bringing all the Japanese
enterprises, naval and military, to nought, was by fighting Togo's fleet
"to a frazzle," even if their own fleet perished in the conflict. Then
the Baltic Fleet, if it had any fight in it at all, must have made short
work of what remained of Togo's fleet, and the Japanese communications
with Manchuria being thereby severed, Russia might have dictated her own
terms of peace. The real lesson of that war is not that a true fleet in
being can ever be safely neglected, but that a fleet which can be
neglected with impunity is no true fleet in being. It should never be
forgotten that the problems of naval warfare are essentially
psychological and not mechanical in their nature. Their ultimate
determining factors are not material and ponderable forces operating
with measurable certainty, but those immaterial and imponderable forces
of the human mind and will which can be measured by no standard other
than the result. By the material standard so popular in these days, and
withal so full of fallacy, Nelson should have been defeated at Trafalgar
and Rozhdestvensky should have been victorious at Tsu-Shima.

It is, of course, idle to press the doctrine of the command of the sea
and the principle of the fleet in being so far as to affirm that no
military enterprise of any kind can be prosecuted across the sea unless
an unassailable command of the sea has first been established. Such a
proposition is disallowed by the whole course of naval history, which
is, in truth, for the most part, the history of the command of the sea
remaining in dispute, often for long periods, between two belligerents,
the balance inclining sometimes to one side and sometimes to the other,
according to the fortune of war. The whole question is in the main one
of degree and of circumstances. Broadly speaking, it may be said that
the l