The criticism of the _Daily Mail_ was made within three months of a "raging and tearing" big navy campaign, all of it based on the assumption that Germany _was_ "looking for the spoils of war," the English naval increase being thus a direct outcome of such motives. Without it, the question of English increase would not have arisen.[113] The only justification for the clamor for increase was that England was liable to _attack_; every nation in Europe justifies its armaments in the same way; every nation consequently believes in the universal existence of this motive for attack. The _Times_ has been hardly less insistent than the _Mail_ as to the danger from German aggression; but its criticism would imply that the motive behind that prospective aggression is not a desire for any political advantage or gain of any sort. Germany apparently recognizes aggression to be, not merely barren of any useful result whatsoever, but burdensome and costly into the bargain; she is, nevertheless, determined to enter upon it in order that though she suffer, someone else will suffer more![114] In common with the London _Daily Mail_ and the London _Times_, Admiral Mahan fails to understand this "platitude," which underlies the relation of defence to aggression. Thus in his criticism of this book, he cites the position of Great Britain during the Napoleonic era as proof that commercial advantage goes with the possession of preponderant military power in the following passage: Great Britain owed her commercial superiority then to the armed control of the sea, which had sheltered her commerce and industrial fabric from molestation by the enemy. _Ergo_, military force has commercial value, a result which is arrived at by this method: in deciding a case made up of two parties you ignore one. England's superiority was not due to the employment of military force, but to the fact that she was able to prevent the employment of military force against her; and the necessity for so doing arose from Napoleon's motive in threatening her. But for the existence of this motive to aggression--moral or material, just or mistaken--Great Britain, without any force whatsoever, would have been more secure and more prosperous than she was; she would not have been spending a third of her income in war, and her peasantry would not have been starving. Of a like character to the remark of the _Times_ is the criticism of the _Spectator_, as follows: