indeed, pedantic precedents; but they are the
illustrations of living principles. Napoleon is reported to have said
that on the field of battle the happiest inspiration is often but a
recollection. The authority of Jomini chiefly set me to study in this
fashion the many naval histories before me. From him I learned the
few, very few, leading considerations in military combination; and in
these I found the key by which, using the record of sailing navies and
the actions of naval leaders, I could elicit, from the naval history
upon which I had looked despondingly, instruction still pertinent. The
actual course of the several campaigns, or of the particular battles,
I worked out as one does any historical conclusion, by comparison of
the individual witnesses presented in the several accounts; but the
result of this constructive process became to me something more than a
narrative. Both the general outcome and the separate incidents passed
through tests which formed in me an habitual critical habit of mind.
My judgments, one or all, might be erroneous; but, right or wrong,
what I brought before myself was no mere portrayal, accurate as I
could achieve, but a rational whole, of composite cause and effect,
with its background and foreground, its centre of interest and
argument, its greater and smaller details, its decisive culmination;
for even to a drawn battle or a neutral issue there is something which
definitely prevented success. It was the same with questions of naval
policy. Jomini's dictum, that the organized forces of the enemy are
ever the chief objective, pierces like a two-edged sword to the joints
and marrow of many specious propositions; to that of the French
postponement of immediate action to "ulterior objects," or to
Jefferson's reliance upon raw citizen soldiery, a mob ready
disorganized to the enemy's hands when he saw fit to lay on. From
Jomini also I imbibed a fixed disbelief in the thoughtlessly accepted
maxim that the statesman and general occupy unrelated fields. For this
misconception I substituted a tenet of my own, that war is simply a
violent political movement; and from an expression of his, "The
sterile glory of fighting battles merely to win them," I deduced, what
military men are prone to overlook, that "War is not fighting, but
business."

It was with such hasty equipment that I approached my self-assigned
task, to show how the control of the sea, commercial and military, had
been an object