kading fleet was quickly raised to the highest
temper by the stress of vigilance and danger that was its incessant
portion. So long as the strain did not pass the limit of human endurance,
it was all to the good. In the old days, with very moderate reliefs, the
limit was never reached, and the sacrifices that were made to those
exhausting vigils were rewarded twentyfold in exuberant confidence on the
day of battle. Can we expect the same compensation now? Will the balance of
strength and weakness remain as it used to be? In the face of the vast
change of conditions and the thinness of experience, it is to general
principles we must turn for the answer.

What, in fact, is the inherent weakness of close blockade? Strategical
theory will at once reply that it is an operation which involves "an arrest
of the offensive," a situation which is usually taken to exhibit every kind
of drawback. Close blockade is essentially an offensive operation, although
its object is usually negative; that is, it is a forward movement to
prevent the enemy carrying out some offensive operation either direct or by
way of counterstroke. So far the common tendency to confuse "Seeking out
the enemy's fleet" with "Making the enemy's coast your frontier" may be
condoned. But the two operations are widely different in that they have
different objectives. In "seeking out," our objective is the enemy's armed
force. In "making the enemy's coast our frontier," the objective is
inseparable from the ulterior object of the naval war. In this case the
objective is the common communications. By establishing a blockade we
operate offensively against those communications. We occupy them, and then
we can do no more. Our offensive is arrested; we cannot carry it on to the
destruction of the enemy's fleet. We have to wait in a defensive attitude,
holding the communications we have seized, till he chooses to attack in
order to break our hold; and during that period of arrest the advantage of
surprise--the all-important advantage in war--passes by a well recognised
rule to our enemy. We, in fact, are held upon the defensive, with none of
the material advantages of the defensive. The moral advantage of having
taken the initiative remains, but that is all. The advantage which we thus
gain will of course have the same kind of depressing effect upon the
blockaded fleet as it had of old, but scarcely in so high a degree. The
degradation of a steam fleet in port can scarcely