ing fact which is entirely unknown on land. It is simply
this--that it is possible for your enemy to remove his fleet from the board
altogether. He may withdraw it into a defended port, where it is absolutely
out of your reach without the assistance of an army. No amount of naval
force, and no amount of offensive spirit, can avail you. The result is that
in naval warfare an embarrassing dilemma tends to assert itself. If you are
in a superiority that justifies a vigorous offensive and prompts you to
seek out your enemy with a view to a decision, the chances are you will
find him in a position where you cannot touch him. Your offence is
arrested, and you find yourself in what, at least theoretically, is the
weakest general position known to war.

This was one of our earliest discoveries in strategy. It followed indeed
immediately and inevitably upon our discovery that the most drastic way of
making war was to concentrate every effort on the enemy's armed forces. In
dealing with the theory of war in general a caveat has already been entered
against the too common assumption that this method was an invention of
Napoleon's or Frederick's, or that it was a foreign importation at all. In
the view at least of our own military historians the idea was born in our
Civil Wars with Cromwell and the New Model Army. It was the conspicuous
feature that distinguished our Civil War from all previous wars of modern
times. So astonishing was its success--as foreign observers remarked--that
it was naturally applied by our soldier-admirals at sea so soon as war
broke out with the Dutch. Whatever may be the claims of the Cromwellian
soldiers to have invented for land warfare what is regarded abroad as the
chief characteristic of the Napoleonic method, it is beyond doubt that they
deserve the credit of it at sea. All three Dutch wars had a commercial
object, and yet after the first campaign the general idea never was to make
the enemy's commerce a primary objective. That place was occupied
throughout by their battle-fleets, and under Monk and Rupert at least those
objectives were pursued with a singleness of purpose and a persistent
vehemence that was entirely Napoleonic.

But in the later stages of the struggle, when we began to gain a
preponderance, it was found that the method ceased to work. The attempt to
seek the enemy with a view to a decisive action was again and again
frustrated by his retiring to his own coasts, where either we could