rength or a strategical distribution which would make
our trade absolutely invulnerable is to march to economic ruin. It is to
cripple our power of sustaining war to a successful issue, and to seek a
position of maritime despotism which, even if it were attainable, would set
every man's hand against us. All these evils would be upon us, and our goal
would still be in the far distance. In 1870 the second naval Power in the
world was at war with an enemy that could not be considered a naval Power
at all, and yet she lost ships by capture. Never in the days of our most
complete domination upon the seas was our trade invulnerable, and it never
can be. To seek invulnerability is to fall into the strategical vice of
trying to be superior everywhere, to forfeit the attainment of the
essential for fear of risking the unessential, to base our plans on an
assumption that war may be waged without loss, that it is, in short,
something that it never has been and never can be. Such peace-bred dreams
must be rigorously abjured. Our standard must be the mean of economic
strength--the line which on the one hand will permit us to nourish our
financial resources for the evil day, and on the other, when that day
comes, will deny to the enemy the possibility of choking our financial
vigour by sufficiently checking the flow of our trade.

III. ATTACK, DEFENCE, AND SUPPORT OF
MILITARY EXPEDITIONS

The attack and defence of oversea expeditions are governed in a large
measure by the principles of attack and defence of trade. In both cases it
is a question of control of communications, and in a general way it may be
said, if we control them for the one purpose, we control them for the
other. But with combined expeditions freedom of passage is not the only
consideration. The duties of the fleet do not end with the protection of
the troops during transit, as in the case of convoys, unless indeed, as
with convoys, the destination is a friendly country. In the normal case of
a hostile destination, where resistance is to be expected from the
commencement of the operations, the fleet is charged with further duties of
a most exacting kind. They may be described generally as duties of support,
and it is the intrusion of these duties which distinguish the naval
arrangements for combined operations most sharply from those for the
protection of trade. Except for this consideration there need be no
difference in the method of defence. In each case the stren