to you when you got it, would be a poor return for the loss to which you would have been put in the process.  That loss might, and probably would, leave you at a great disadvantage as regards enemies more nearly on an equality with yourself.  It would, therefore, not be the improbability of breaking down the local naval defence of a minor maritime state, but the pressure of qualifying and only indirectly belligerent considerations, that would prevent its being attempted.

In a struggle between two antagonists of the first rank, the circumstances would be different.  Purely belligerent considerations would have fuller play.  Mistakes will be made, of course, for war is full of mistakes; but it may be accepted that an attack on any position, however defended, is in itself proof that the assailant believed the result hoped for to be quite worth the cost of obtaining it.  Consequently, in a struggle as assumed, every mode of defence would have to stand on its intrinsic merits, nearly or quite unaided by the influence of considerations more or less foreign to it.  Every scrap of local defence would, in proportion to its amount, be a diminution of the offensive defence.  Advocates of the former may be challenged to produce from naval history any instance of local naval defence succeeding against the assaults of an actively aggressive navy.  In the late war between Japan and Russia the Russian local defence failed completely.

In the last case, a class of vessel like that which had failed in local defence was used successfully, because offensively, by the Japanese.  This and many another instance show that the right way to use the kind of craft so often allocated to local defence is to use them offensively.  It is only thus that their adoption by a great maritime power like the British Empire can be justified.  The origin and centre of our naval strength are to be looked for in the United Kingdom.  The shores of the latter are near the shores of other great maritime powers.  Its ports, especially those at which its fleets are equipped and would be likely to assemble on the imminence of war, are within reach of more than one foreign place from which small swift craft to be used offensively might be expected to issue.  The method of frustrating the efforts of these craft giving most promise of success is to attack them as soon as possible after they issue from their own port.  To the acceptance of this principle we owe the origin of the destroyer, devised to destroy hostile torpedo-boats before they could reach a position from which they would be able to discharge with effect their special weapon against our assembled ships.  It is true that the destroyer has been gradually converted into a larger torpedo-boat.  It is also true that when used as such in local defence, as at Port Arthur, her failure was complete; and just as true that she has never accomplished anything except when used offensively.