been able to gather to herself the most desirable regions of the earth, and to gather them at the expense of the greatest military Powers, is a paradox to which such Powers find it hard to be reconciled.  The phenomenon seemed always a matter of chance-an accident without any foundation in the essential constants of war.  It remained for Clausewitz, unknown to himself, to discover that explanation, and he reveals it to us in the inherent strength of limited war when means and conditions are favourable for its use.

We find, then, if we take a wider view than was open to Clausewitz and submit his latest ideas to the test of present imperial conditions, so far from failing to cover the ground they gain a fuller meaning and a firmer basis.  Apply them to maritime warfare and it becomes clear that his distinction between limited and unlimited war does not rest alone on the moral factor.  A war may be limited not only because the importance of the object is too limited to call forth the whole national force, but also because the sea may be made to present an insuperable physical obstacle to the whole national force being brought to bear.  That is to say, a war may be limited physically by the strategical isolation of the object, as well as morally by its comparative unimportance.

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CHAPTER FIVE

WARS OF INTERVENTION—­
LIMITED INTERFERENCE IN UNLIMITED WAR

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Before leaving the general consideration of limited war, we have still to deal with a form of it that has not yet been mentioned.  Clausewitz gave it provisionally the name of “War limited by contingent,” and could find no place for it in his system.  It appeared to him to differ essentially from war limited by its political object, or as Jomini put it, war with a territorial object.  Yet it had to be taken into account and explained, if only for the part it had played in European history.

For us it calls for the most careful examination, not only because it baffled the great German strategist to reconcile it with his theory of war, but also because it is the form in which Great Britain most successfully demonstrated the potentiality for direct continental interference of a small army acting in conjunction with a dominant fleet.

The combined operations which were the normal expression of the British method of making war on the limited basis were of two main classes.  Firstly, there were those designed purely for the conquest of the objects for which we went to war, which were usually colonial or distant oversea territory; and secondly, operations more or less upon the European seaboard designed not for permanent conquest, but as a method of disturbing our enemy’s plans and strengthening the hands of our allies and our own position.  Such operations might take the form of insignificant coastal diversions, or they might rise through all degrees of importance till, as in Wellington’s operations in the Peninsula, they became indistinguishable in form from regular continental warfare.