The original intention, with which the leading articles of the present
collection were undertaken, was to elicit some of the lessons
derivable from the war between the United States and Spain; but in the
process of conception and of treatment there was imparted to them the
further purpose of presenting, in a form as little technical and as
much popular as is consistent with seriousness of treatment, some of
the elementary conceptions of warfare in general and of naval warfare
in particular. The importance of popular understanding in such matters
is twofold. It promotes interest and induces intelligent pressure upon
the representatives of the people, to provide during peace the
organization of force demanded by the conditions of the nation; and it
also tends to avert the unintelligent pressure which, when war exists,
is apt to assume the form of unreasoning and unreasonable panic. As a
British admiral said two hundred years ago, "It is better to be
alarmed now, as I am, than next summer when the French fleet may be in
the Channel." Indifference in times of quiet leads directly to
perturbation in emergency; for when emergency comes, indifference is
found to have resulted in ignorance, and fear is never so overpowering
as when, through want of comprehension, there is no check upon the
luxuriance of the imagination.
It is, of course, vain to expect that the great majority of men should
attain even an elementary knowledge of what constitutes the strength
or weakness of a military situation; but it does not seem extravagant
to hope that the individuals, who will interest themselves thus far,
may be numerous enough, and so distributed throughout a country, as to
constitute rallying points for the establishment of a sound public
opinion, and thus, in critical moments, to liberate the responsible
authorities from demands which, however unreasonable, no
representative government can wholly withstand.
The articles do not in any sense constitute a series. Written for
various occasions, at various times, there is in them no sequence of
treatment, or even of conception. Except the last, however, they all
have had a common origin in the war with Spain. This may seem somewhat
questionable as regards the one on the Peace Conference; but, without
assuming to divine all the motives which led to the call for that
assembly, the writer is persuaded that between it and the war there
was the direct sequence of a corollary to its proposition. The
hostilities with Spain brought doubtless the usual train of
sufferings, but these were not on such a scale as in themselves to
provoke an outcry for universal peace. The political consequences, on
the other hand, were much in excess of those commonly resultant from
war,--even from maritime war. The quiet, superficially peaceful
progress with which Russia was successfully advancing her boundaries
in Asia, adding gain to gain, unrestrained and apparently
irrestrainable, was suddenly confronted with the appearance of the
United States in the Philippines, under conditions which made
inevitable both a continuance of occupancy and a great increase of
military and naval strength. This intrusion, into a sphere hitherto
alien to it, of a new military power, capable of becoming one of the
first force, if it so willed, was momentous in itself; but it was
attended further with circumstances which caused Great Britain, and
Great Britain alone among the nations of the earth, to appear the
friend of the United States in the latter's conflict. How this
friendliness was emphasized in the Philippines is a matter of common
report.
Coincident with all this, though also partly preceding it, has been
the growing recognition by the western nations, and by Japan, of the
imminence of great political issues at stake in the near future of
China. Whether regarded as a field for commerce, or for the exercise
of the varied activities by which the waste places of the earth are
redeemed and developed, it is evidently a matter of economical--and
therefore of political--importance to civilized nations to prevent the
too preponderant control there of any one of their number, lest the
energies of their own citizens be debarred from a fair opportunity to
share in these advantages. The present conditions, and the recent
manifestations of antagonism and rivalry, are too well known for
repetition. The general situation is sufficiently understood, yet it
is doubtful whether the completeness and rapidity of the revolution
which has taken place in men's thoughts about the Pacific are duly
appreciated. They are shown not only by overt aggressive demands of
various European states, or by the extraordinary change of sentiment
on the subject of expansion that has swept over America, but very
emphatically by the fact, little noted yet well assured, that leading
statesmen of Japan--which only three years ago warned the United
States Government that even the annexation of Hawaii could not by her
be seen with indifference--now welcome our presence in the
Philippines.
This altered attitude, on the part of a people of such keen
intelligence, has a justification which should not be ignored, and a
significance which should not be overlooked. It bears vivid testimony
to the rate at which events, as well as their appreciation of events
and of conditions, have been advancing. It is one of the symptoms of a
gathering accord of conviction upon a momentous subject. At such a
time, and on such a scene, the sympathetic drawing together of the two
great English-speaking nations, intensely commercial and enterprising,
yet also intensely warlike when aroused, and which exceed all others
in their possibilities of maritime greatness, gave reason for
reflection far exceeding that which springs from imaginative
calculations of the future devastations of war. It was a direct result
of the war with Spain, inevitably suggesting a probable drift towards
concurrent action upon the greatest question of the immediate future,
in which the influence of force will be none the less real because
sedulously kept in the background of controversies. If, however, the
organic development of military strength could be temporarily arrested
by general agreement, or by the prevalence of an opinion that war is
practically a thing of the past, the odds would be in favor of the
state which at the moment of such arrest enjoys the most advantageous
conditions of position, and of power already created.
In reproducing these articles, the writer has done a little editing,
of which it is needless to speak except in one respect. His views on
the utility of coast fortification have met with pronounced adverse
criticism in some quarters in England. Of this he has neither cause
nor wish to complain; but he is somewhat surprised that his opinions
on the subject here expressed are thought to be essentially opposed to
those he has previously avowed in his books,--the Influence of
Sea-Power upon History, and upon the French Revolution. While wholly
convinced of the primacy of the navy in maritime warfare, and
maintaining the subordination to it of the elements of power which
rest mainly upon land positions, he has always clearly recognized, and
incidentally stated, not only the importance of the latter, but the
general necessity of affording them the security of fortification,
which enables a weaker force to hold its own against sudden attack,
and until relief can be given. Fortifications, like natural accidents
of ground, serve to counterbalance superiority of numbers, or other
disparity of means; both in land and sea warfare, therefore, and in
both strategy and tactics, they are valuable adjuncts to a defence,
for they constitute a passive reinforcement of strength, which
liberates an active equivalent, in troops or in ships, for offensive
operations. Nor was it anticipated that when coast defence by
fortification was affirmed to be a nearly constant element, the word
"constant" would be understood to mean the same for all countries, or
under varying conditions of popular panic, instead of applying to the
deliberate conclusions of competent experts dealing with a particular
military problem.
Of the needs of Great Britain, British officers should be the best
judge, although even there there is divergence of opinion; but to his
own countrymen the author would say that our experience has shown that
adequate protection of a frontier, by permanent works judiciously
planned, conduces to the energetic prosecution of offensive war. The
fears for Washington in the Civil War, and for our chief seaports in
the war with Spain, alike illustrate the injurious effects of
insufficient home defence upon movements of the armies in the field,
or of the navies in campaign. In both instances dispositions of the
mobile forces, vicious from a purely military standpoint, were imposed
by fears for stationary positions believed, whether rightly or
wrongly, to be in peril.
For the permission to republish these articles the author begs to
thank the proprietors of the several periodicals in which they first
appeared. The names of these, and the dates, are given, together with
the title of each article, in the Table of Contents.