or destruction serves the purposes of an enemy.  The man who trudges the highway, cudgel in hand, may claim for his cudgel all the sacredness with which civilization invests property; but if he use it to break his neighbor’s head, the respect for his property, as such, quickly disappears.  Now, private property borne upon the seas is engaged in promoting, in the most vital manner, the strength and resources of the nation by which it is handled.  When that nation becomes belligerent, the private property, so called, borne upon the seas, is sustaining the well-being and endurance of the nation at war, and consequently is injuring the opponent, to an extent exceeding all other sources of national power.  In these days of war correspondents, most of us are familiar with the idea of the dependence of an army upon its communications, and we know, vaguely perhaps, but still we know, that to threaten or harm the communications of an army is one of the most common and effective devices of strategy.  Why?  Because severed from its base an army languishes and dies, and when threatened with such an evil it must fight at whatever disadvantage.  Well, is it not clear that maritime commerce occupies, to the power of a maritime state, the precise nourishing function that the communications of an army supply to the army?  Blows at commerce are blows at the communications of the state; they intercept its nourishment, they starve its life, they cut the roots of its power, the sinews of its war.  While war remains a factor, a sad but inevitable factor, of our history, it is a fond hope that commerce can be exempt from its operations, because in very truth blows against commerce are the most deadly that can be struck; nor is there any other among the proposed uses of a navy, as for instance the bombardment of seaport towns, which is not at once more cruel and less scientific.  Blockade such as that enforced by the United States Navy during the Civil War, is evidently only a special phase of commerce-destroying; yet how immense—­nay, decisive—­its results!

It is only when effort is frittered away in the feeble dissemination of the guerre-de-course, instead of being concentrated in a great combination to control the sea, that commerce-destroying justly incurs the reproach of misdirected effort.  It is a fair deduction from analogy, that two contending armies might as well agree to respect each other’s communications, as two belligerent states to guarantee immunity to hostile commerce.

THE FUTURE IN RELATION TO AMERICAN NAVAL POWER.

June, 1895.

That the United States Navy within the last dozen years should have been recast almost wholly, upon more modern lines, is not, in itself alone, a fact that should cause comment, or give rise to questions about its future career or sphere of action.  If this country needs, or ever shall need, a navy at all, indisputably in 1883 the hour had come when the time-worn hulks of that day, mostly the honored but superannuated survivors of the civil war, should drop out of the ranks, submit to well-earned retirement or inevitable dissolution, and allow their places to be taken by other vessels, capable of performing the duties to which they themselves were no longer adequate.