iod
may be reckoned as generally three months, while by watchful
administration it might at times be protracted to six.

It is desirable to explain here what was, and is, the particular
specific utility of operations directed toward the destruction of an
enemy's commerce; what its bearing upon the issues of war; and how,
also, it affects the relative interests of antagonists, unequally
paired in the matter of sea power. Without attempting to determine
precisely the relative importance of internal and external commerce,
which varies with each country, and admitting that the length of
transportation entails a distinct element of increased cost upon the
articles transported, it is nevertheless safe to say that, to nations
having free access to the sea, the export and import trade is a very
large factor in national prosperity and comfort. At the very least, it
increases by so much the aggregate of commercial transactions, while
the ease and copiousness of water carriage go far to compensate for
the increase of distance. Furthermore, the public revenue of maritime
states is largely derived from duties on imports. Hence arises,
therefore, a large source of wealth, of money; and money--ready money
or substantial credit--is proverbially the sinews of war, as the War
of 1812 was amply to demonstrate. Inconvertible assets, as business
men know, are a very inefficacious form of wealth in tight times; and
war is always a tight time for a country, a time in which its positive
wealth, in the shape of every kind of produce, is of little use,
unless by freedom of exchange it can be converted into cash for
governmental expenses. To this sea-commerce greatly contributes, and
the extreme embarrassment under which the United States as a nation
labored in 1814 was mainly due to commercial exclusion from the sea.
To attack the commerce of the enemy is therefore to cripple him, in
the measure of success achieved, in the particular factor which is
vital to the maintenance of war. Moreover, in the complicated
conditions of mercantile activity no one branch can be seriously
injured without involving others.

This may be called the financial and political effect of "commerce
destroying," as the modern phrase runs. In military effect, it is
strictly analogous to the impairing of an enemy's communications, of
the line of supplies connecting an army with its base of operations,
upon the maintenance of which the life of the army depends. Money,
cr