es which never rise beyond a blockade.

Such a view of the subject was of course a wide departure from the theory
of "Absolute War" on which Clausewitz had started working. Under that
theory "Absolute War" was the ideal form to which all war ought to attain,
and those which fell short of it were imperfect wars cramped by a lack of
true military spirit. But so soon as he had seized the fact that in actual
life the moral factor always must override the purely military factor, he
saw that he had been working on too narrow a basis--a basis that was purely
theoretical in that it ignored the human factor. He began to perceive that
it was logically unsound to assume as the foundation of a strategical
system that there was one pattern to which all wars ought to conform. In
the light of his full and final apprehension of the value of the human
factor he saw wars falling into two well-marked categories, each of which
would legitimately be approached in a radically different manner, and not
necessarily on the lines of "Absolute War."

He saw that there was one class of war where the political object was of so
vital an importance to both belligerents that they would tend to fight to
the utmost limit of their endurance to secure it. But there was another
class where the object was of less importance, that is to say, where its
value to one or both the belligerents was not so great as to be worth
unlimited sacrifices of blood and treasure. It was these two kinds of war
he designated provisionally "Unlimited" and "Limited," by which he meant
not that you were not to exert the force employed with all the vigour you
could develop, but that there might be a limit beyond which it would be bad
policy to spend that vigour, a point at which, long before your force was
exhausted or even fully developed, it would be wiser to abandon your object
rather than to spend more upon it.

This distinction it is very necessary to grasp quite clearly, for it is
often superficially confused with the distinction already referred to,
which Clausewitz drew in the earlier part of his work--that is, the
distinction between what he called the character of modern war and the
character of the wars which preceded the Napoleonic era. It will be
remembered he insisted that the wars of his own time had been wars between
armed nations with a tendency to throw the whole weight of the nation into
the fighting line, whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wars