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Rh occupied the Isle of Wight or effected a landing at a dozen other spots upon the south coast of England. From what we know of Santa Cruz there is no reason to believe that he would have attempted to use it so ill-found as it actually was; and had it been less ill-found, had it not run out of ammunition, had it been properly handled, the English plight would have been undoubtedly serious. Its own utter failure is proof that it failed; but it is less clear that it proves invasion in face of a fleet to have been impossible in the sixteenth century when invaders lived upon the country invaded in ways impossible to-day. Scipio Africanus invaded Africa and reduced Carthage to sue for peace in face of a defending fleet which once at least attacked him with some success. Coming to more recent events the Allies invaded the Crimea in face of a fleet which, had it only acted as the English acted against the Armada, might or might not have reproduced the Elizabethan tragedy. It made no attempt to do so—Russian imagination being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the oversea expedition of the Allies, or else, as has been suggested elsewhere in this book, because the Russians elected to fight the issue on land. In any case, an oversea operation bearing a remarkable likeness to the Spanish Armada in its general conception—that is to say, attack by a very powerful naval force without any previous attempt to secure the command of the sea, was undertaken and succeeded.

The conception involved in the move of the Baltic