hostile relations that he found
his solution. His experience on the Staff, and his study of the inner
springs of war, told him it was never in fact a question of purely military
endeavour aiming always at the extreme of what was possible or expedient
from a purely military point of view. The energy exhibited would always be
modified by political considerations and by the depth of the national
interest in the object of the war. He saw that real war was in fact an
international relation which differed from other international relations
only in the method we adopted to achieve the object of our policy. So it
was he arrived at his famous theory--"that war is a mere continuation of
policy by other means."

At first sight there seems little enough in it. It may seem perhaps that we
have been watching a mountain in labour and nothing but a mouse has been
produced. But it is only upon some such simple, even obvious, formula that
any scientific system can be constructed with safety. We have only to
develop the meaning of this one to see how important and practical are the
guiding lines which flow from it.

With the conception of war as a continuation of political intercourse
before us, it is clear that everything which lies outside the political
conception, everything, that is, which is strictly peculiar to military and
naval operations, relates merely to the means which we use to achieve our
policy. Consequently, the first desideratum of a war plan is that the means
adopted must conflict as little as possible with the political conditions
from which the war springs. In practice, of course, as in all human
relations, there will be a compromise between the means and the end,
between the political and the military exigencies. But Clausewitz held that
policy must always be the master. The officer charged with the conduct of
the war may of course demand that the tendencies and views of policy shall
not be incompatible with the military means which are placed at his
disposal; but however strongly this demand may react on policy in
particular cases, military action must still be regarded only as a
manifestation of policy. It must never supersede policy. The policy is
always the object; war is only the means by which we obtain the object, and
the means must always keep the end in view.

The practical importance of this conception will now become clear. It will
be seen to afford the logical or theoretical exposition of what we began by