ness in our methods, for new and
effective tricks, so that we may win the War. I would never disparage
cleverness; the more you can get of it, the better; but it is useless
unless it is in the service of something stronger and greater than
itself, and that is character. Cleverness can grasp; it is only
character that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was not a clever man; he
was a man of simple and honourable mind, with an infinite capacity for
patience, persistence, and endurance, so that neither unexpected
reverses abroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could shake him or
change him. So he bore a chief part in laying low the last great tyranny
that desolated Europe.

None of our great wars was won by cleverness; they were all won by
resolution and perseverance. In all of them we were near to despair and
did not despair. In all of them we won through to victory in the end.

But in none of them did victory come in the expected shape. The worst of
making elaborate plans of victory, and programmes of all that is to
follow victory, is that the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans.
Not every war finds its decision in a single great battle. Think of our
war with Spain in the sixteenth century. Spain was then the greatest of
European Powers. She had larger armies than we could raise; she had
more than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The newly discovered
continent of America was an appanage of Spain, and her great galleons
were wafted lazily to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the
western hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and holding on. We
fought her in the Low Countries, which she enslaved and oppressed. We
refused to recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our merchant
seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have kept it for the last three
years. When at last we became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she
collected a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us; and it
was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the sailors of England, in
1588. The defeat of the Armada was the turning-point of the war, but it
was not the end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts of the
people, as a great shadow of fear has already been lifted from their
hearts in the present War, but during the years that followed we
suffered many and serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace
and security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years after the
defeat of the Armada, th