st defences. With us, able to live off
ourselves, there is more approach to parity. Men may even differ as to
which is the more important; but such difference, in this question,
which is purely military, is not according to knowledge. In equal
amounts, mobile offensive power is always, and under all conditions,
more effective to the ends of war than stationary defensive power.
Why, then, provide the latter? Because mobile force, whatever shape
it take, ships or men, is limited narrowly as to the weight it can
bear; whereas stationary force, generally, being tied to the earth, is
restricted in the same direction only by the ability of the designer
to cope with the conditions. Given a firm foundation, which
practically can always be had, and there is no limit to the amount of
armor,--mere defensive outfit,--be it wood, stone, bricks, or iron,
that you can erect upon it; neither is there any limit to the weight
of guns, the offensive element, that the earth can bear; only they
will be motionless guns. The power of a steam navy to move is
practically unfettered; its ability to carry weight, whether guns or
armor, is comparatively very small. Fortifications, on the contrary,
have almost unbounded power to bear weight, whereas their power to
move is _nil_; which again amounts to saying that, being chained, they
can put forth offensive power only at arm's length, as it were. Thus
stated, it is seen that these two elements of sea warfare are in the
strictest sense complementary, one possessing what the other has not;
and that the difference is fundamental, essential, unchangeable,--not
accidental or temporary. Given local conditions which are generally
to be found, greater power, defensive and offensive, can be
established in permanent works than can be brought to the spot by
fleets. When, therefore, circumstances permit ships to be squarely
pitted against fortifications,--not merely to pass swiftly by
them,--it is only because the builders of the shore works have not,
for some reason, possibly quite adequate, given them the power to
repel attack which they might have had. It will not be asserted that
there are no exceptions to this, as to most general rules; but as a
broad statement it is almost universally true. "I took the liberty to
observe," wrote Nelson at the siege of Calvi, when the commanding
general suggested that some vessels might batter the forts, "that the
business of laying wood against walls was much altered of l