force our will upon him.

In the long run a rigorous and uninterrupted blockade is almost sure to
exhaust him before it exhausts us, but the end will be far and costly. As a
rule, therefore, we have found that where we had a substantial predominance
our enemy preferred to submit to commercial blockade in hope that by the
chances of war or the development of fresh force he might later on be in a
better position to come out into the open. That he should come out and
stake the issue in battle was nearly always our wish, and it was obvious
that too rigorous a naval blockade was not the way to achieve the desired
end, or to reap the strategical result which we might expect from
paralysing his commerce. Consequently where the desire for a decision at
sea was not crossed by higher military considerations, as in the case of
imminent invasion, or where we ourselves had an important expedition in
hand, it was to our interest to incline the enemy's mind towards the bolder
choice.

The means was to tempt him with a prospect of success, either by leading
him to believe the blockading force was smaller than it was, or by removing
it to such a distance as would induce him to attempt to evade it, or both.
A leading case of such an open blockade was Nelson's disposition of his
fleet off Cadiz when he was seeking to bring Villeneuve to action in 1805.
But merely to leave a port open does not fulfil the idea of open blockade,
and in this case to opportunity and temptation Nelson added the pressure of
a commercial blockade of the adjacent ports in hope of starving Villeneuve
into the necessity of taking to the sea.

Finally, in a general comparison of the two forms, we have to observe that
close blockade is characteristically a method of securing local and
temporary command. Its dominating purpose will usually be to prevent the
enemy's fleet acting in a certain area and for a certain purpose. Whereas
open blockade, in that it aims at the destruction of an enemy's naval
force, is a definite step towards securing permanent command.

Enough has now been said to show that the question of choice between close
and open blockade is one of extreme complexity. Our naval literature, it is
true, presents the old masters as divided into two schools on the subject,
implying that one was in favour of the close form always, and the other of
the open form. We are even led to believe that the choice depended on the
military spirit of the officer concerne