coasts, rely exclusively upon stationary works, if the conditions
admit, not upon floating batteries which have the weaknesses of ships.
If you wish offensive war carried on vigorously upon the seas, rely
exclusively upon ships that have the qualities of ships and not of
floating batteries. We had in the recent hostilities 26,000 tons of
shipping sealed up in monitors, of comparatively recent construction,
in the Atlantic and the Pacific. There was not an hour from first to
last, I will venture to say, that we would not gladly have exchanged
the whole six for two battleships of less aggregate displacement; and
that although, from the weakness of the Spanish defences, we were able
to hug pretty closely most parts of the Cuban coast. Had the Spanish
guns at Santiago kept our fleet at a greater distance, we should have
lamented still more bitterly the policy which gave us sluggish
monitors for mobile battleships.

II

THE EFFECT OF DEFICIENT COAST-DEFENCE UPON THE MOVEMENTS OF
THE NAVY.--THE MILITARY AND NAVAL CONDITIONS OF SPAIN
AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR.

The unsatisfactory condition of the coast defences, whereby the navy
lost the support of its complementary factor in the scheme of national
sea power, imposed a vicious, though inevitable, change in the
initial plan of campaign, which should have been directed in full
force against the coast of Cuba. The four newer monitors on the
Atlantic coast, if distributed among our principal ports, were not
adequate, singly, to resist the attack which was suggested by the
possibilities of the case--though remote--and still more by the panic
among certain of our citizens. On the other hand, if the four were
massed and centrally placed, which is the correct disposition of any
mobile force, military or naval, intended to counteract the attack of
an enemy whose particular line of approach is as yet uncertain, their
sluggishness and defective nautical qualities would make them
comparatively inefficient. New York, for instance, is a singularly
central and suitable point, relatively to our northern Atlantic
seaboard, in which to station a division intended to meet and thwart
the plans of a squadron like Cervera's, if directed against our coast
ports, in accordance with the fertile imaginations of evil which were
the fashion in that hour. Did the enemy appear off either Boston, the
Delaware, or the Chesapeake, he could not effect material injury
before a d