ght the South to terms; while it would
be an exaggeration to state that all the land battles fought in the
Civil War were unnecessary, that all the bloodshed and all the ruin
of harvests and of homesteads were unnecessary, nevertheless it does
seem that so long as the navy maintained the blockade which it did
maintain, the people of the South would have been prevented from
achieving enough prosperity to carry on an independent government;
so that their revolt would have failed. The South, not being able
to raise the blockade by means of their navy, might have tried to
do so by sending an army into the Northern States, to whip the
Northerners on their own ground; but this would clearly have been
impossible.

The sentences above are not written with the intention of minimizing
the services rendered by the army in the Civil War, or of detracting
from the glory of the gallant officers and men who composed it, or
of subtracting one jot or tittle from a grateful appreciation of
their hardships and bloodshed; neither do they dare to question
the wisdom of the statesmen who directed that the war should be
fought mainly by the army. Their sole intention is to point out
that, if a meagre naval force could produce so great an effect
against a country _mainly agricultural_, a very powerful naval
force, blockading effectively the principal ports of a _manufacturing
country_, would have an effect so great that it can hardly be estimated.

It is plainly to be seen that the effect of a blockade against a
purely commercial country by a modern navy would be incomparably
greater now than it was fifty years ago, for two very important
reasons. One reason is that the progress of modern engineering
has made navies very much more powerful than they were fifty years
ago; and the other reason is that the same cause has made countries
very much more vulnerable to blockade, because it has made so many
millions of people dependent upon manufacturing industries and the
export of manufactured things, and forced them to live an artificial
life. While the United States, for instance, does not depend for
its daily bread on the regular coming of wheat from over the sea,
yet millions of its people do depend, though indirectly, upon the
money from the export of manufactured things; for with countries,
as with people, habits are formed both of system and of mode of
life, which it is dangerous suddenly to break; so that a country
soon becomes as dependen