policy from the first; the destruction of our cables; night assaults upon our war ports and assembling ships in the narrow seas by the numerous torpedo craft; an attempt to surprise one or more of our squadrons en flagrant délit de concentration if the strategical situation permits; attacks of a raiding character in many parts of the world, with a view, as Napoleon expressed it, to make us 'experience the sense of our weakness'; war against commerce waged in a ruthless manner and aiming at the destruction of our carrying trade by fair means or foul; masterly inactivity by the main French squadrons, combined with an attempt to wear out our watching squadrons by constant and harassing attacks, surprises, and threatened descents; finally, when we are lulled into a false sense of security, and our forces have been weakened by large detachments abroad, the final stroke, aiming as in Napoleon's time at the mastery of the Channel for six days, and invasion.

To think that a great country like France proposes to simply endure a war at our hands and not to wage it, is the most dangerous of fallacies, nor has she any means of concluding the war or even of saving her numerous, scattered, and almost defenceless colonies except this one extreme solution. I hope,' wrote Collingwood in 1803, that Bonaparte's invasion will not be held too lightly, for in that consists the only danger.'

Of all these operations, the only one which it is proposed to discuss in this paper is the war against commerce, since strange ideas are entertained on this subject, which are quite at variance with the truth. There is no doubt that not only the Jeune École, but also an increasing number of naval officers, and many civilians, flatter themselves that the most surprising results will follow this method of attack; what M. Lockroy describes as a terrible means of intimidation and of victory' equally recommends itself to the sober judgment of M. de Kerjégu, who goes out of his way to applaud it in his Budget report, while it is even more important to bear in mind that French constructive activity is now being devoted to produce the very weapons and ships for carrying these ideas into practice. What commercial war means, and to what lengths the French propose to carry it, any one can learn who reads that strange effusion with the misleading title of Stratégie Navale, or any of Admiral Aube's works, or again certain numbers of the Marine Française, which is constantly harping on its favourite theme.

We are told that our coasts are to be bombarded and defenceless towns burned to the ground; that inoffensive merchant vessels with their load of women and children are to be incontinently sent to the bottom; in fact, the only thing we are not told is where the British Navy comes in.

So far as our coasts are concerned, these threats are not worth very serious consideration; a fugitive gunboat, in terror for its very

existence, may here and there skulk across under cover of night and wage war against the bathing machines with relentless vigour, but nobody will be a penny the worse. A few houses may be knocked down, but many invalid resorts on the south coast would really be improved by some slight architectural alterations; some old women will be frightened, and a few inquisitive children massacred; but the exasperation which such acts would cause may have a very serious influence upon the war, and not at all in the manner intended, while the fate of the crew of the gunboat if it is ever brought to book one hardly likes to discuss.

The war against commerce on the sea is, however, a much more serious matter; yet it can be shown that there are many and weighty reasons for the belief that this mode of warfare will also fail to achieve the results expected. Raids upon our great maritime lines of communication will be made from bases both at home and abroad. The French naval divisions abroad, as well as their local stations, are to our forces in the same waters in the proportion of about 1 to 6; the vessels employed are for the most part old and slow, and their coaling stations widely scattered and badly found; one cannot doubt that they will speedily find their wings clipped.

In France, however, we find a fair number of smart cruisers now ready, and others building which are in many ways suited for longdistance raiding. Judging by the past, some of these will act singly, others be used to form two or three flying squadrons, which will break out at the first signal, and, acting in groups, hope to be temporarily superior to our scattered cruisers on convoy and patrol; each flying squadron may be accompanied by one or two swift steam colliers or by fast liners with coal stored in place of cargo, after the example of the Nictheroy (ex El Cid), purchased by Brazil in 1893, which is reported to have taken 1,000 tons of coal in her bunkers and to have stored 2,000 tons in place of cargo. Auxiliary cruisers from the merchant fleet will also take their part in this warfare; the arrangements for the conversion of certain of these vessels are now complete and can be rapidly effected.

The primary consideration in these operations will be the adaptation of the plan of the cruise to the coal endurance of the ships. In the old days the privateers only required to touch land for the purpose of procuring fresh water and provisions, which could be obtained almost anywhere. But coal is quite another matter; it is contraband of war, and can only be obtained in friendly fortified harbours, by rendezvous with colliers, or by seizure from hostile ships or ports. Judging by the very complete and prolonged experiments conducted of late years, the cruisers which will probably be detailed for commerce raiding may be expected to burn about one ton of coal for every four miles traversed, and in a month's cruise three or four large cruisers would require some 8,000 tons for continuous activity. The

accumulation of such immense war reserves of coal abroad, combined with that of naval stores, spare machinery, food, and so forth, represents a large outlay, and might even then possibly be never used. An inspection of the coal capacity of French cruisers shows that the first-class vessels have at the outside from 800 to 1,000 tons, answering at most, at a fairly economical rate of speed and allowing for the drain of auxiliary engines, to a radius of action of about 5,000 miles. Now if we take a chart of ocean routes, we see at once how very inadequate this coal endurance is for the prosecution of war against our commerce. Unless a French cruiser can rely with absolute certainty, which it never will be able to do, upon finding security and coal in plenty when at the end of its tether, it cannot venture more than 2,500 miles from its starting-point; and in view of the need of keeping a reserve for fighting and fast steaming 2,000 miles would probably be a practical limit. With this radius, except in the Mediterranean and with the possible exception of our unimportant West African possession at Bathurst, no British colony can be reached, no raiding or ransoming is practicable, and the depredations must be confined to the maritime zone 2,000 miles from the French coasts. But, it may be said, certain French defended coaling stations exist, and must be taken into consideration. Certainly they do, and one only wishes there were more of them. Forming as it does a fixed point in the cruise, the coaling station, even though suitably supplied, equipped, and defended, is of far less value to an inferior than to a superior fleet, since its known existence gives the latter a point de repère where it will sooner or later run its enemy to ground. The Jeune École has taken this into account, and would replace the fixed coaling stations by rendezvous with steam colliers at unfrequented localities. But in the latter case the life of the cruiser is bound up with that of the collier, whose existence again will be very precarious, since our highly developed system of information may easily give us notice of its sailing; and thus it may frequently happen that the cruiser will fail to find the aid it anticipates, and die of inanition.

Thus, while a certain amount of damage always has been and always will be effected by this long-distance raiding, such action under modern conditions has very defined limitations, numbers are bound to tell in the end, and the extinction of these flying squadrons will ultimately be only a question of time.

More serious, though less far-reaching, will be the action of the larger number of French cruisers whose depredations will be confined to a zone between 500 and 1,000 miles from the French coasts. With a centralised control it does not depend upon individual commanders to decide what they will or will not do, but upon the directing admirals at headquarters. The successes of French corsairs in the past, so well brought out by Mr. Norman, were mainly due to their independence of the direct control of admirals at home. These latter

will now naturally wish to keep all resources in hand for the final stroke, and will look jealously upon any severance of their control over the flying squadrons. They may also say, and with good reason, that there is no special advantage in going half round the world in pursuit of trade which must, in order to reach its destination, pass within striking distance of French shores: that it is preferable to keep all French ships under observation and within call, in order to seize the throat of the trade lines which converge towards the shores of the United Kingdom; the true danger to Australian trade will not be in Australian waters. In this argument their views would be strengthened by the consideration that French home ports are well supplied and defended, and that by using them French cruisers will be able to carry home many prizes which flying squadrons could only destroy. So far as regards our ocean trade, history shows that during the great wars lasting from 1793 to 1815 this trade nearly doubled in volume, and that even during the last years of that period, when we had the United States upon our back, there was still an annual increase, despite the depredations of American privateers, while in the meantime the sea-borne trade of our enemies was almost entirely destroyed. Is it nothing for France to find her sea-borne trade, now valued at 300,000,000l. sterling annually, entirely lost to her? Given sufficient numbers, adequate protection, and proper arrangements, trade will thrive and increase: numbers, indeed, are not everything, but no great and lasting results have ever been obtained in the whole history of war without them. The French dreamers appear constitutionally incapable of looking at commercial warfare from any point of view but their own, and their arguments for the most part gratuitously assume stupidity on the part of our leaders as a fixed point in the general situation. Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain, and history shows that the measures and precautions we have taken in times of danger have generally been dictated by solid common sense-a quality which tells more in the long run in military operations than the intermittent flashes of more fascinating genius.

If, led to hasty conclusions by immature reasoning and the panic of self interest, our shipowners attempt to transfer their vessels to a neutral flag they will have every cause to repent it, since no neutral flag can compensate for the absence of a great protecting navy; and if this neutral is not strong enough to ensure respect for his flag by force of arms, his newly acquired trade, now, as in the past, will be at the mercy of the belligerent, who will not fail to use his advantage. Even if the legal difficulties of transfer and the manning of ships under the neutral flag could be arranged, there is no security that the neutral himself may not be drawn into the struggle, and in this case the last state of the transferers will be worse than the first.

A belief that our home industries will be deprived of the raw

materials necessary for their continuous activity is not in harmony with history, which shows that the losses of our carrying trade in war have varied between 2 and 5 per cent.; a different result can only be expected if we neglect the well-ascertained needs of our position.

That the war against commerce will starve us into submission is a still more improbable contingency. Although we must all deplore the reduced acreage of cereals under cultivation at home, and the reduction of stocks by merchants owing to the fluctuation and fall of prices, new grain markets like that of Argentina are constantly being opened up, and the interception of this trade is not within the power of an inferior navy itself in constant risk and dread of being overwhelmed by superior numbers. Our foreign commerce has innumerable points of departure abroad, and the ports of arrival in the United Kingdom are so many that even a very superior fleet could not establish a blockade of any real efficacy. Between America and England, England and the Cape, the Cape and India, there are vast expanses of ocean, over which a hundred different routes may be chosen. The horizon of the smartest cruiser is limited to some twenty miles when at sea; and even if a merchant vessel is sighted, it by no means follows that she is caught, unless the cruiser has a great superiority of speed, sights its prey early in the morning, and is not interrupted during, perhaps, a ten hours' chase. The war routes of our ocean trade can be regulated and varied by the Admiralty, and being known to us will be patrolled by our cruisers ; the enemy will have first to find the route, and then escape interruption during his depredations. It is true that in comparatively narrow waters like the Mediterranean the interception of passing trade will be an easier task, but, as regards food supplies, the country which would be hardest hit by the dislocation of Mediterranean trade would be Russia--a condition of affairs not calculated to predispose her in favour of her new ally-while America would have a word to say if food were declared contraband of war, and her most profitable trade interrupted.

From this brief inquiry into the chances of the new style of warfare with which we are threatened, the conclusion is that, although a certain amount of damage will no doubt be done to our trade, such action has its limits; that the radius of effective action of the steamer corsair of an inferior navy will be much less than that of the old sailing privateer, and will rarely extend to distant seas; that on this account less damage will probably be effected than in the old wars; finally, that systematised commercedestroying directed against a mercantile marine protected by a superior navy cannot reasonably be expected to have any lasting or decisive influence upon the main issues of the war. These considerations are equally applicable to the hypothesis of war