elson's intuitions and
activity kept the English fleet ever on the track of the enemy, and
brought it up in time at the decisive moment.[4] The tactics at
Trafalgar, while open to criticism in detail, were in their main
features conformable to the principles of war, and their audacity was
justified as well by the urgency of the case as by the results; but
the great lessons of efficiency in preparation, of activity and energy
in execution, and of thought and insight on the part of the English
leader during the previous months, are strategic lessons, and as such
they still remain good.

In these two cases events were worked out to their natural and
decisive end. A third may be cited, in which, as no such definite end
was reached, an opinion as to what should have been done may be open
to dispute. In the war of the American Revolution, France and Spain
became allies against England in 1779. The united fleets thrice
appeared in the English Channel, once to the number of sixty-six sail
of the line, driving the English fleet to seek refuge in its ports
because far inferior in numbers. Now, the great aim of Spain was to
recover Gibraltar and Jamaica; and to the former end immense efforts
both by land and sea were put forth by the allies against that nearly
impregnable fortress. They were fruitless. The question suggested--and
it is purely one of naval strategy--is this: Would not Gibraltar have
been more surely recovered by controlling the English Channel,
attacking the British fleet even in its harbors, and threatening
England with annihilation of commerce and invasion at home, than by
far greater efforts directed against a distant and very strong outpost
of her empire? The English people, from long immunity, were
particularly sensitive to fears of invasion, and their great
confidence in their fleets, if rudely shaken, would have left them
proportionately disheartened. However decided, the question as a point
of strategy is fair; and it is proposed in another form by a French
officer of the period, who favored directing the great effort on a
West India island which might be exchanged against Gibraltar. It is
not, however, likely that England would have given up the key of the
Mediterranean for any other foreign possession, though she might have
yielded it to save her firesides and her capital. Napoleon once said
that he would reconquer Pondicherry on the banks of the Vistula. Could
he have controlled the English Channel, as