Page:The Second Armada - Hayward - 1871.pdf/8

 which neither could quit its proper element for aggressive purposes without imminent risk of discomfiture or destruction. Germany would no more think of sending an armament across the North Sea to invade England, than England would think of landing an army at Hamburg to advance on Berlin. Nor was the navy of the United States sufficiently strong in seagoing ironclads, like the Minotaur or Monarch, to cross the Atlantic and encounter the English in their own waters.

So thought and argued the wise men of England in 1871. They thought and argued well; but wise men, however well they argue, will sometimes turn out wrong; and they turned out substantially wrong in this instance—as wrong as the late lamented Cobden when he made the tour of Europe to announce that, for all time to come, Free Trade had rendered war a moral impossibility. Unluckily, mankind are more swayed by their passions, their prejudices, their caprices, and their vanity, than by their well-understood interests; and so it fell out that, in the year 1874, the greatest of the Continental Powers, having taken umbrage at the tone and attitude of England in reference to sundry fresh parcellings out of territory, a league, including the most powerful states, was formed for the avowed purpose of reducing the British Isles to the condition of conquered provinces, to be divided among the conquerors. The best mode of invading England had been so often the subject of competitive examination at the military schools, that an eager desire to test theory by practice was felt by every young officer of promise; and a saying of the greatest of modern strategists had got abroad to the effect that the capture of London, as compared with that of Paris, would be