The objection to such a course which appears to have the most weight with current opinion is the moral one, which is inseparable from all deliberate choices of the defensive. If the watching fleet remains in a home fortified base, it may be assumed that the usual moral degradation will set in. But the method does not entail the inglorious security of such a base. A sound position may well be found at a spot such as Admiral Togo occupied while waiting for the Baltic fleet, and in that case there was no observable degradation of any kind. Nor is there much evidence that this objection weighed materially with the opponents of Howe's view. Their objection was of a purely physical kind. Open blockade left the enemy too much freedom to raid our trade routes. The watching system might be sufficient to keep an unwilling battle-fleet in port or to bring a more adventurous one to action, but it could not control raiding squadrons. This was certainly Barham's objection. "If," he wrote to Pitt in 1794, "the French should have any intention of sending their fleet to sea with this easterly wind, and Lord Howe continues at Torbay, our Mediterranean and Jamaica convoys are in a very critical situation. Both fleets must by this time be drawing near the Channel, and cannot enter it while the easterly wind holds." This danger must always be with us, especially in narrow waters such as the North Sea. In more open theatres the difficulty is not so obtrusive, for with sufficient sea room trade may take naturally or by direction a course which our watching dispositions will cover. Thus with Nelson in the case of Toulon, his normal positions on the Sardinian coast covered effectually the flow of our trade to the Levant and the Two Sicilies, which was all there was at the time. The truth is, that in endeavouring to decide between open and close blockade we find ourselves confronted with those special difficulties which so sharply distinguish naval warfare from warfare on land. We cannot choose on purely naval considerations. In naval warfare, however great may be our desire to concentrate our effort on the enemy's main forces, the ulterior object will always obtrude itself. We must from the first do our best to control sea communications, and since those communications are usually common, we cannot refrain from occupying those of the enemy without at the same time neglecting and exposing our own. Thus in the case of Brest a close blockade was always desirable, and especially at convoy seasons, because the great trade routes which passed within striking distance of the port were all common, whereas in the region of Toulon the main lines were not common except along the coasts of Africa and Southern Italy, and these Nelson's open blockade amply secured.