itional sea policy and the diplomatic
embarrassment caused by the violation of Portuguese neutrality, should
have heartily and generously acknowledged a vigor of action to which
it was unused in its admirals.

It has been said that Suffren, who had watched the cautious movements
of D'Estaing in America, and had served in the Seven Years' War,
attributed in part the reverses suffered by the French at sea to the
introduction of Tactics, which he stigmatized as the veil of timidity;
but that the results of the fight at Porto Praya, necessarily engaged
without previous arrangement, convinced him that system and method had
their use.[171] Certainly his tactical combinations afterward were of
a high order, especially in his earlier actions in the East (for he
seems again to have abandoned them in the later fights under the
disappointment caused by his captains' disaffection or blundering).
But his great and transcendent merit lay in the clearness with which
he recognized in the English fleets, the exponent of the British sea
power, the proper enemy of the French fleet, to be attacked first and
always when with any show of equality. Far from blind to the
importance of those ulterior objects to which the action of the French
navy was so constantly subordinated, he yet saw plainly that the way
to assure those objects was not by economizing his own ships, but by
destroying those of the enemy. Attack, not defence, was the road to
sea power in his eyes; and sea power meant control of the issues upon
the land, at least in regions distant from Europe. This view out of
the English policy he had the courage to take, after forty years of
service in a navy sacrificed to the opposite system; but he brought to
its practical application a method not to be found in any English
admiral of the day, except perhaps Rodney, and a fire superior to the
latter. Yet the course thus followed was no mere inspiration of the
moment; it was the result of clear views previously held and
expressed. However informed by natural ardor, it had the tenacity of
an intellectual conviction. Thus he wrote to D'Estaing, after the
failure to destroy Barrington's squadron at Sta. Lucia, remonstrating
upon the half-manned condition of his own and other ships, from which
men had been landed to attack the English troops:--

"Notwithstanding the small results of the two cannonades of the
15th of December [directed against Barrington's squadron], and
the unhap