"Again, when those troops lodged on the sea-shores shall be forced to run from place to place in vain, after a fleet of ships, they will at length sit down in the midway and leave all at adventure. But say it were otherwise, that the invading enemy will offer to land in some such place where there shall be an army of ours ready to receive him; yet it cannot be doubted but that when the choice of all our trained bands, and the choice of our commanders and captains, shall be drawn together--as they were at Tilbury in the year 1588--to attend the person of the Prince, and for the defence of the city of London, they that remain to guard the coast can be of no such force as to encounter an army like unto that wherewith it was intended that the Prince of Parma should have landed in England. "For end of this digression, I hope that this question shall never come to trial: his majesty's many movable forts will forbid the experience. And although the English will no less disdain, than any nation under heaven can do, to be beaten upon their own ground, or elsewhere, by a foreign enemy, yet to entertain those that shall assail us, with their own beef in their bellies, and before they eat of our Kentish capons, I take it to be the wisest way--to do which his majesty, after God, will employ his good ships on the sea, and not trust in any intrenchment upon the shore." The introduction of steam as a propelling power at sea has added tenfold weight to these arguments of Raleigh. On the other hand, a well-constructed system of railways, especially of coast-lines, aided by the operation of the electric telegraph, would give facilities for concentrating a defensive army to oppose an enemy on landing, and for moving troops from place to place in observation of the movements of the hostile fleet, such as would have astonished Sir Walter, even more than the sight of vessels passing rapidly to and fro without the aid of wind or tide., The observation of the French marshal whom he quotes is now no longer correct. Armies can be made to pass from place to place almost with the speed of wings, and far more rapidly than any post-travelling that was known in the Elizabethan or any other age. Still, the presence of a sufficient armed force at the right spot, at the right time, can never be made a matter of certainty and, even after the changes that have taken place, no one can doubt but that the policy of Raleigh is that which England should ever seek to follow in defensive war.