attacking the British fleet even in its harbors, and threatening
England with annihilation of commerce and invasion at home, than by
far greater efforts directed against a distant and very strong outpost
of her empire? The English people, from long immunity, were
particularly sensitive to fears of invasion, and their great
confidence in their fleets, if rudely shaken, would have left them
proportionately disheartened. However decided, the question as a point
of strategy is fair; and it is proposed in another form by a French
officer of the period, who favored directing the great effort on a
West India island which might be exchanged against Gibraltar. it is
not, however, likely that England would have given up the key of the
Mediterranean for any other foreign possession, though she might have
yielded it to save her firesides and her capital. Napoleon once said
that he would reconquer Pondicherry on the banks of the Vistula. Could
he have controlled the English Channel, as the allied fleet did for a
moment in 1779, can it be doubted that he would have conquered
Gibraltar on the shores of England?

To impress more strongly the truth that history both suggests
strategic study and illustrates the principles of war by the facts
which it transmits, two more instances will be taken, which are more
remote in time than the period specially considered in this work. How
did it happen that, in two great contests between the powers of the
East and of the West in the Mediterranean, in one of which the empire
of the known world was at stake, the opposing fleets met on spots so
near each other as Actium and Lepanto? Was this a mere coincidence, or
was it due to conditions that recurred, and may recur again? (1) If
the latter, it is worth while to study out the reason; for if there
should again arise a great eastern power of the sea like that of
Antony or of Turkey, the strategic questions would be similar. At