ike that of Sta.
Lucia, a surprise, and could only have been effected by the defeat,
or, as happened, by the absence of the enemy's fleet. In North America
and India sound military policy pointed out, as the true objective,
the enemy's fleet, upon which also depended the communications with
the mother-countries. There remains Europe, which it is scarcely
profitable to examine at length as a separate field of action, because
its relations to the universal war are so much more important. It may
simply be pointed out that the only two points in Europe whose
political transfer was an object of the war were Gibraltar and
Minorca; the former of which was throughout, by the urgency of Spain,
made a principal objective of the allies. The tenure of both these
depended, obviously, upon control of the sea.

In a sea war, as in all others, two things are from the first
essential,--a suitable base upon the frontier, in this case the
seaboard, from which the operations start, and an organized military
force, in this case a fleet, of size and quality adequate to the
proposed operations. If the war, as in the present instance, extends
to distant parts of the globe, there will be needed in each of those
distant regions secure ports for the shipping, to serve as secondary,
or contingent, bases of the local war. Between these secondary and the
principal, or home, bases there must be reasonably secure
communication, which will depend upon military control of the
intervening sea. This control must be exercised by the navy, which
will enforce it either by clearing the sea in all directions of
hostile cruisers, thus allowing the ships of its own nation to pass
with reasonable security, or by accompanying in force (convoying) each
train of supply-ships necessary for the support of the distant
operations. The former method aims at a widely diffused effort of the
national power, the other at a concentration of it upon that part of
the sea where the convoy is at a given moment. Whichever be adopted,
the communications will doubtless be strengthened by the military
holding of good harbors, properly spaced yet not too numerous, along
the routes,--as, for instance, the Cape of Good Hope and the
Mauritius. Stations of this kind have always been necessary, but are
doubly so now, as fuel needs renewing more frequently than did the
provisions and supplies in former days. These combinations of strong
points at home and abroad, and the condition of the c