e redressed.
The imperfect and too tardy blockade to which the enemy is somewhat
timidly subjected is a factor in aid of this; and we may be fairly
confident that, if a third period is reached before the enemy shall
have the advantage of a decision, there will be a preponderance of
munitioning upon the Allied side in the West and the East which will
be, if anything, of superior importance to the approaching
preponderance in numbers.

Having thus briefly surveyed the opposing strength of either
combatant, checked and measured as it varied with the progress of the
war, we will turn to the _moral_ opposition of military theory
between the one party and the other, and show how here again that,
_save in the most important matter of all, grand strategy_, the enemy
was on the highroad to the victory which he confidently and, for that
matter, reasonably expected.

(3) THE CONFLICTING THEORIES OF WAR.

The long peace which the most civilized parts of Europe had enjoyed
for now a generation left more and more uncertain the value of
theories upon the conduct of war, which theories had for the most part
developed as mere hypotheses untested by experience during that
considerable period. The South African and the Manchurian war had
indeed proved certain theories sound and others unsound, so far as
their experience went; but they were fought under conditions very
different from those of an European campaign, and the progress of
material science was so rapid in the years just preceding the great
European conflict that the mass of debated theories still remained
untried at its outbreak.

The war in its first six months thoroughly tested these theories, and
proved, for the greater part of them, which were sound in practice and
which unsound. I will tabulate them here, and beg the special
attention of the reader, because upon the accuracy of these forecasts
the first fortunes of the war depended.

I. A German theory maintained that, with the organization of and the
particular type of discipline in the German service, attacks could be
delivered in much closer formation than either the French or the
English believed to be possible.

The point is this: After a certain proportion of losses inflicted
within a certain limit of time, troops break or are brought to a
standstill. That was the universal experience of all past war. When
the troops that are attacking break or are brought to a standstill,
the attack fails. But what you can