sought to found the primacy of his country. To one as ignorant as I was of mercantile movement, the story of Colbert's methods, owing to their pure autocracy, was a kind of introductory primer to this element of sea power. Thus received, the impression was both sharper and deeper. New light was shed upon, and new emphasis given to, the commonplace assertion of the relations between commerce and a navy; civil and military sea power. While I have no claim to mastery of the arguments for and against free trade and protection, Colbert, as expounded by Martin, sent me in later days to the study of trade statistics; as indicative of naval or political conditions deflecting commercial interchange, and influencing national prosperity. The strong interest such searches had for me may show a natural bent, and certainly conduced to the understanding of sea power in its broadest sense. Martin set my feet in the way, though Campbell helped me much by incidental mention. It is now accepted with naval and military men who study their profession, that history supplies the raw material from which they are to draw their lessons, and reach their working conclusions. Its teachings are not, indeed, pedantic precedents; but they are the illustrations of living principles. Napoleon is reported to have said that on the field of battle the happiest inspiration is often but a recollection. The authority of Jomini chiefly set me to study in this fashion the many naval histories before me. From him I learned the few, very few, leading considerations in military combination; and in these I found the key by which, using the record of sailing navies and the actions of naval leaders, I could elicit, from the naval history upon which I had looked despondingly, instruction still pertinent. The actual course of the several campaigns, or of the particular battles, I worked out as one does any historical conclusion, by comparison of the individual witnesses presented in the several accounts; but the result of this constructive process became to me something more than a narrative. Both the general outcome and the separate incidents passed through tests which formed in me an habitual critical habit of mind. My judgments, one or all, might be erroneous; but, right or wrong, what I brought before myself was no mere portrayal, accurate as I could achieve, but a rational whole, of composite cause and effect, with its background and foreground, its centre of interest and argument, its greater and smaller details, its decisive culmination; for even to a drawn battle or a neutral issue there is something which definitely prevented success. It was the same with questions of naval policy. Jomini's dictum, that the organized forces of the enemy are ever the chief objective, pierces like a two-edged sword to the joints and marrow of many specious propositions; to that of the French postponement of immediate action to "ulterior objects," or to