to take refuge under
foreign flags."[44] Finally, in quitting this part of the subject, it
may be remarked that in the island of Martinique the French had a
powerful distant dependency upon which to base a cruising warfare; and
during the Seven Years' War, as afterward during the First Empire, it,
with Guadeloupe, was the refuge of numerous privateers. "The records
of the English admiralty raise the losses of the English in the West
Indies during the first years of the Seven Years' War to fourteen
hundred merchantmen taken or destroyed." The English fleet was
therefore directed against the islands, both of which fell, involving
a loss to the trade of France greater than all the depredations of her
cruisers on the English commerce, besides breaking up the system; but
in the war of 1778 the great fleets protected the islands, which were
not even threatened at any time.

So far we have been viewing the effect of a purely cruising warfare,
not based upon powerful squadrons, only upon that particular part of
the enemy's strength against which it is theoretically directed,--upon
his commerce and general wealth; upon the sinews of war. The evidence
seems to show that even for its own special ends such a mode of war is
inconclusive, worrying but not deadly; it might almost be said that it
causes needless suffering. What, however, is the effect of this policy
upon the general ends of the war, to which it is one of the means, and
to which it is subsidiary? How, again, does it react upon the people
that practise it? As the historical evidences will come up in detail
from time to time, it need here only be summarized. The result to
England in the days of Charles II. has been seen,--her coast insulted,
her shipping burned almost within sight of her capital. In the War of
the Spanish Succession, when the control of Spain was the military
object, while the French depended upon a cruising war against
commerce, the navies of England and Holland, unopposed, guarded the
coasts of the peninsula, blocked the port of Toulon, forced the French
succors to cross the Pyrenees, and by keeping open the sea highway,
neutralized the geographical nearness of France to the seat of war.
Their fleets seized Gibraltar, Barcelona, and Minorca, and
co-operating with the Austrian army failed by little of reducing
Toulon. In the Seven Years' War the English fleets seized, or aided in
seizing, all the most valuable colonies of France and Spain, and made
fre