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Updated: May 31, 2025
'Every aspect of the war, says Colomb, 'is interesting to this country, as Japan is to China in a position similar to that which the British Islands occupy to the European continent. It was additionally interesting because the sea-power of Japan was a novelty. Though a novelty, it was well known by English naval men to be superior in all essentials to that of China, a novelty itself.
The Minos who is most familiar to us in Greek story is not so much the lawgiver and priest of God as the great sea-King and tyrant, the overlord of the Ægean, whose vengeance was defeated by the bravery of the Athenian hero, Theseus. From this point of view, Minos was the first of men who recognized the importance of sea-power, and used it to establish the supremacy of his island kingdom.
It compels peace without sacrificing life. It is the most scientific warfare, because the least sanguinary, and because, like the highest strategy, it is directed against the communications, the resources, not the persons, of the enemy. It has been the glory of sea-power that its ends are attained by draining men of their dollars instead of their blood.
Foiled in these three directions by the sea-power of Great Britain, unable, with all his manipulation of the prostrate continent, to inflict a deadly wound, Bonaparte now resorted to the threat of invasion, well aware that, under existing conditions, it could be but a threat, yet hoping that its influence upon a people accustomed to sleep securely might further his designs.
One division, two divisions, four ships, eight Dreadnoughts even a squadron coming out of a harbour numbs the faculties with a sense of its might. Sixteen twenty twenty-four it was the unending numbers of this procession of sea-power which was most impressive. An hour passed and all were not by.
Yet what avail the four thousand flaming forges which have made all this possible, what avails the British sea-power which has landed these amazing quantities of shells in France, and 2,000,000 of men along with them, if the shells cannot be delivered to the guns? And that is where the great new systems of railway have come in.
We had to content ourselves with the practical realization in war of our continual claim in peace that sea-power is an instrument for the defence of island states rather than one for offence against continental peoples. Only when and where those peoples wished to be defended and opened their ports to their allies, was it found possible to land a relieving force.
One found it hard to realize the resisting power of their armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability of their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the great shells that travelled ten miles to their target. Sea-power, indeed! And world-power, too, there in the hollow of a nation's hand, to throw in whatever direction she pleased.
This Virginia farmer and landsman was not only ignorant and distrustful of all the implements of war, but utterly unfamiliar with the ways of the sea and with the first principles of sea-power. The Tripolitan War seems to have inspired him with a single fixed idea that for defensive purposes gunboats were superior to frigates and less costly.
Brief as it is, it shows that on the subject of sea-power he was a predecessor of Mahan. In a speech in favour of prosecuting the war, which he puts into the mouth of Pericles, these words occur: oimeu garouchexousiuallaeuautilabeiuamacheiaemiudeesti gaepollaekaieuuaesoiskaikataepeiroumegagar totesthalassaeskratos.
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