e a converse case, in which judgment kept
the aphorism silent. It is true that during the earlier stage of the naval
operations the Japanese did in a sense seek out the enemy's fleet, in so
far as they advanced their base close to Port Arthur; but this was done,
not with any fixed intention of destroying the Russian fleet--there was
small hope of that at sea--but rather because by no other means could they
cover the army's lines of passage, which it was the function of the fleet
to secure, the true offensive operations being on land. Never except once,
under express orders from Tokio, did either Admiral Togo or Admiral
Kamimura press offensive movements in such a way as to jeopardise the
preventive duty with which the war plan charged them. Still less in the
later stage, when everything depended on the destruction of the Baltic
fleet, did Admiral Togo "seek it out." He was content, as the Americans
should have been content, to have set up such a situation that the enemy
must come and break it down if they were to affect the issue of the war. So
he waited on the defensive, assured his enemy must come to him, and thereby
he rendered it, as certain as war can be, that when the moment for the
tactical offensive came his blow should be sure and sudden, in overwhelming
strength of concentration, and decisive beyond all precedent.

Clearly, then, the maxim of "seeking out" for all its moral exhilaration,
for all its value as an expression of high and sound naval spirit, must not
be permitted to displace well-reasoned judgment. Trusty servant as it is,
it will make a bad master, as the Americans found to their serious
jeopardy. Yet we feel instinctively that it expresses, as no other aphorism
does, the secret of British success at sea. We cannot do without it; we
cannot do with it in its nakedness. Let us endeavour to clothe it with its
real meaning, with the true principles that it connotes. Let us endeavour
to determine the stuff that it is made of, and for this purpose there is no
better way than to trace its gradual growth from the days when it was born
of the crude and virile instinct of the earliest masters.

The germ is to be found in the despatch already mentioned which Drake wrote
from Plymouth at the end of March in 1588. His arguments were not purely
naval, for it was a combined problem, a problem of defence against
invasion, that had to be solved. What he wished to persuade the Government
was, that the kernel of the