Page:Can Germany Invade England?.djvu/18

6 difference between operations conducted on a well-considered system from an organised centre, and proceeding at haphazard without such centre, and risking the loss of one's communications."

In these few words the great master of the science and art of war described both the true strategy and the false; and the long, fierce struggle between the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth century affords a perfect demonstration of both. So long as England conducted that war *' on a well-considered system from an organised centre " in the English Channel, thus severing Holland's communications with the outer world, including her own colonies, she paralysed the action of the Dutch Fleet, and maintained her own supremacy on the sea