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 be so rapid or debilitating as it was when nine-tenths of seamanship lay in the smart handling of sails.  For the blockading fleet it is also true that the effects of weather, which formerly were the main cause of wear and tear, can scarcely be so severe.  But, on the other hand, the physical strain to officers and men, and the difficulty of supply, will be far greater, so long at least as coal is the chief fuel.  The wind no longer sets a measure on the enemy’s movements.  Vigilance close and unremitting beyond all our predecessors knew is the portion of the blockaders to prevent surprise.  Furthermore, in the old days surprise meant at worst the enemy’s escape; now it may mean our own destruction by mine or torpedo.  It is unnecessary to labour the point.  It is too obvious that a close blockade of the old type exhibits under present conditions the defects of “arrested offence” in so high a degree as practically to prohibit its use.