stores are accumulated.  Visits to it for the sake of repair being necessary, the occasion may be taken advantage of to replenish supplies, so that the maintenance of a stock at the place makes for convenience, provided that the stock is not too large.  The so-called ‘secondary base’ is a place at which it is intended to keep in store coal and other articles in the hope that when war is in progress the supply of our ships may be facilitated.  It is a supply, and not a repairing base.

A comparison of the ‘direct’ system and ‘secondary base’ system may be interesting.  A navy being maintained for use in war, it follows, as a matter of course, that the value of any part of its equipment or organisation depends on its efficiency for war purposes.  The question to be answered is—­Which of the two systems promises to help us most during hostilities?  This does not exclude a regard for convenience and economy in time of peace, provided that care is taken not to push economy too far and not to make ordinary peace-time convenience impede arrangements essential to the proper conduct of a naval campaign.

It is universally admitted that a secondary base at which stocks of stores are kept should be properly defended.  This necessitates the provision of fortifications and a garrison.  Nearly every article of naval stores of all classes has to be brought to our bases by sea, just as much as if it were brought direct to our ships.  Consequently the communications of the base have to be defended.  They would continue to need defending even if our ships ceased to draw supplies from it, because the communications of the garrison must be kept open.  We know what happened twice over at Minorca when the latter was not done.

The object of accumulating stores at a secondary base is to facilitate the supply of fighting ships, it being rather confidently assumed that the ships can go to it to replenish without being obliged to absent themselves for long from the positions in which they could best counteract the efforts of the enemy.  When war is going on it is not within the power of either side to arrange its movements exactly as it pleases.  Movements must, at all events very often, conform to those of the enemy.  It is not a bad rule when going to war to give your enemy credit for a certain amount of good sense.  Our enemy’s good sense is likely to lead him to do exactly what we wish him not to do, and not to do that which we wish him to do.  We should, of course, like him to operate so that our ships will not be employed at an inconvenient distance from our base of supplies.  If we have created permanent bases in time of peace the enemy will know their whereabouts as well as we do ourselves, and, unless he is a greater fool than it is safe to think he is, he will try to make us derive as little benefit from them as possible.  He is likely to extend his operations to localities at a distance from the places to which, if we have the secondary base system of supply, he knows for certain