operations being on land.  Never except once, under express orders from Tokio, did either Admiral Togo or Admiral Kamimura press offensive movements in such a way as to jeopardise the preventive duty with which the war plan charged them.  Still less in the later stage, when everything depended on the destruction of the Baltic fleet, did Admiral Togo “seek it out.”  He was content, as the Americans should have been content, to have set up such a situation that the enemy must come and break it down if they were to affect the issue of the war.  So he waited on the defensive, assured his enemy must come to him, and thereby he rendered it, as certain as war can be, that when the moment for the tactical offensive came his blow should be sure and sudden, in overwhelming strength of concentration, and decisive beyond all precedent.

Clearly, then, the maxim of “seeking out” for all its moral exhilaration, for all its value as an expression of high and sound naval spirit, must not be permitted to displace well-reasoned judgment.  Trusty servant as it is, it will make a bad master, as the Americans found to their serious jeopardy.  Yet we feel instinctively that it expresses, as no other aphorism does, the secret of British success at sea.  We cannot do without it; we cannot do with it in its nakedness.  Let us endeavour to clothe it with its real meaning, with the true principles that it connotes.  Let us endeavour to determine the stuff that it is made of, and for this purpose there is no better way than to trace its gradual growth from the days when it was born of the crude and virile instinct of the earliest masters.

The germ is to be found in the despatch already mentioned which Drake wrote from Plymouth at the end of March in 1588.  His arguments were not purely naval, for it was a combined problem, a problem of defence against invasion, that had to be solved.  What he wished to persuade the Government was, that the kernel of the situation was not so much Parma’s army of invasion in Flanders, as the fleet that was preparing in Spain to clear its passage.  The Government appeared to be acting on the opposite view.  Howard with the bulk of the fleet was at the base in the Medway within supporting distance of the light squadron that was blockading the Flemish ports in concert with the Dutch.  Drake himself with another light squadron had been sent to the westward with some indeterminate idea of his serving as an observation squadron, or being used in the mediaeval fashion for an eccentric counterstroke.  Being invited to give his opinion on this disposition, he pronounced it vicious.  In his eyes, what was demanded was an offensive movement against the enemy’s main fleet.  “If there may be such a stay or stop made,” he urged, “by any means of this fleet in Spain, so that they may not come through the seas as conquerors, then shall the Prince of Parma have such a check thereby as were meet.”  What he had in his mind is clearly not so much a decision