he nation at war, and consequently is injuring the
opponent, to an extent exceeding all other sources of national power.
In these days of war correspondents, most of us are familiar with the
idea of the dependence of an army upon its communications, and we
know, vaguely perhaps, but still we know, that to threaten or harm the
communications of an army is one of the most common and effective
devices of strategy. Why? Because severed from its base an army
languishes and dies, and when threatened with such an evil it must
fight at whatever disadvantage. Well, is it not clear that maritime
commerce occupies, to the power of a maritime state, the precise
nourishing function that the communications of an army supply to the
army? Blows at commerce are blows at the communications of the state;
they intercept its nourishment, they starve its life, they cut the
roots of its power, the sinews of its war. While war remains a factor,
a sad but inevitable factor, of our history, it is a fond hope that
commerce can be exempt from its operations, because in very truth
blows against commerce are the most deadly that can be struck; nor is
there any other among the proposed uses of a navy, as for instance the
bombardment of seaport towns, which is not at once more cruel and less
scientific. Blockade such as that enforced by the United States Navy
during the Civil War, is evidently only a special phase of
commerce-destroying; yet how immense--nay, decisive--its results!

It is only when effort is frittered away in the feeble dissemination
of the _guerre-de-course_, instead of being concentrated in a great
combination to control the sea, that commerce-destroying justly incurs
the reproach of misdirected effort. It is a fair deduction from
analogy, that two contending armies might as well agree to respect
each other's communications, as two belligerent states to guarantee
immunity to hostile commerce.

THE FUTURE IN RELATION TO AMERICAN NAVAL POWER.

_June, 1895._

That the United States Navy within the last dozen years should have
been recast almost wholly, upon more modern lines, is not, in itself
alone, a fact that should cause comment, or give rise to questions
about its future career or sphere of action. If this country needs, or
ever shall need, a navy at all, indisputably in 1883 the hour had come
when the time-worn hulks of that day, mostly the honored but
superannuated survivors of the civil war, should drop out of the