founded on the negative or positive nature of the object. He was long in
reaching it. His great work _On War_ as he left it proceeds almost entirely
on the conception of offensive or defensive as applied to the Napoleonic
ideal of absolute war. The new idea came to him towards the end in the full
maturity of his prolonged study, and it came to him in endeavouring to
apply his strategical speculations to the practical process of framing a
war plan in anticipation of a threatened breach with France. It was only in
his final section _On War Plans_ that he began to deal with it. By that
time he had grasped the first practical result to which his theory led. He
saw that the distinction between Limited and Unlimited war connoted a
cardinal distinction in the methods of waging it. When the object was
unlimited, and would consequently call forth your enemy's whole war power,
it was evident that no firm decision of the struggle could be reached till
his war power was entirely crushed. Unless you had a reasonable hope of
being able to do this it was bad policy to seek your end by force--that is,
you ought not to go to war. In the case of a limited object, however, the
complete destruction of the enemy's armed force was beyond what was
necessary. Clearly you could achieve your end if you could seize the
object, and by availing yourself of the elements of strength inherent in
the defensive could set up such a situation that it would cost the enemy
more to turn you out than the object was worth to him.

Here then was a wide difference in the fundamental postulate of your war
plan. In the case of an unlimited war your main strategical offensive must
be directed against the armed forces of the enemy; in the case of a limited
war, even where its object was positive, it need not be. If conditions were
favourable, it would suffice to make the object itself the objective of
your main strategical offensive. Clearly, then, he had reached a
theoretical distinction which modified his whole conception of strategy. No
longer is there logically but one kind of war, the Absolute, and no longer