ification,
which enables a weaker force to hold its own against sudden attack,
and until relief can be given. Fortifications, like natural accidents
of ground, serve to counterbalance superiority of numbers, or other
disparity of means; both in land and sea warfare, therefore, and in
both strategy and tactics, they are valuable adjuncts to a defence,
for they constitute a passive reinforcement of strength, which
liberates an active equivalent, in troops or in ships, for offensive
operations. Nor was it anticipated that when coast defence by
fortification was affirmed to be a nearly constant element, the word
"constant" would be understood to mean the same for all countries, or
under varying conditions of popular panic, instead of applying to the
deliberate conclusions of competent experts dealing with a particular
military problem.

Of the needs of Great Britain, British officers should be the best
judge, although even there there is divergence of opinion; but to his
own countrymen the author would say that our experience has shown that
adequate protection of a frontier, by permanent works judiciously
planned, conduces to the energetic prosecution of offensive war. The
fears for Washington in the Civil War, and for our chief seaports in
the war with Spain, alike illustrate the injurious effects of
insufficient home defence upon movements of the armies in the field,
or of the navies in campaign. In both instances dispositions of the
mobile forces, vicious from a purely military standpoint, were imposed
by fears for stationary positions believed, whether rightly or
wrongly, to be in peril.

For the permission to republish these articles the author begs to
thank the proprietors of the several periodicals in which they first
appeared. The names of these, and the dates, are given, together with
the title of each article, in the Table of Contents.

CONTENTS

LESSONS OF THE WAR WITH SPAIN, 1898.
McClure's Magazine, December, 1898-April, 1899.

PAGE
INTRODUCTORY: COMPREHENSION OF MILITARY AND NAVAL MATTERS
POSSIBLE TO THE PEOPLE, AND IMPORTANT TO THE NATION 3

I. How the Motive of the War gave Direction to its Earlier
Movements.--Strategic Value of Puerto
Rico.--Considerations on the Size and Qualities of
Battleships.--Mutual Relations of Coast Defence and Navy 21

II. The Effect of Deficient Coa