the escape of the Toulon squadron.  That escape eventually forced a close concentration on the Western Squadron, but all other considerations apart, it was felt to be impossible to retain the mass for more than two days owing to the fact that the great East and West Indies convoys were approaching, and Villeneuve’s return to Ferrol from Martinique exposed them to squadronal attack.  It was, in fact, impossible to tell whether the mass had not been forced upon us with this special end in view.

In the liability to deflection of this kind lay the most serious strategical objection to the convoy system.  It was sought to minimise it by giving the convoys a secret route when there was apprehension of squadronal interference.  It was done in the case just cited, but the precaution seemed in no way to lessen the anxiety.  It may have been because in those days of slow communication there could be no such certainty that the secret route had been received as there would be now.

Modern developments and changes in shipping and naval material have indeed so profoundly modified the whole conditions of commerce protection, that there is no part of strategy where historical deduction is more difficult or more liable to error.  To avoid such error as far as possible, it is essential to keep those developments in mind at every step.  The more important of them are three in number.  Firstly, the abolition of privateering; secondly, the reduced range of action for all warships; and thirdly, the development of wireless telegraphy.  There are others which must be dealt with in their place, but these three go to the root of the whole problem.

Difficult as it is to arrive at exact statistics of commerce destruction in the old wars, one thing seems certain—­that the bulk of captures, which were reckoned in hundreds and sometimes even in thousands, were due to the action of privateers.  Further, it seems certain that, reckoning at least by numbers, the greater part of the damage was done by small privateers operating close to their bases, either home or colonial, against coastwise and local traffic.  The complaints of merchants, so far as they are known, relate mainly to this kind of work in the West Indies and home waters, while accounts of serious captures by large privateers on the high seas are comparatively rare.  The actual damage done by the swarm of small vessels may not have been great, but its moral effects were very serious.  It was impossible for the strongest Governments to ignore them, and the consequence was a chronic disturbance of the larger strategical dispositions.  While these dispositions were adequate to check the operations of large privateers acting in the same way as regular cruisers, the smaller ones found very free play amidst the ribwork of the protective system, and they could only be dealt with by filling up the spaces with a swarm of small cruisers to the serious detriment of the larger arrangements.  Even so, the proximity of the enemy’s ports made escape so easy, that the work of repression was very ineffective.  The state of the case was indeed almost identical with a people’s war.  The ordinary devices of strategy failed to deal with it, as completely as Napoleon’s broadly planned methods failed to deal with the guerilleros in Spain, or as our own failed for so long in South Africa.