The first effort on hearing of the departure of the hostile fleet will be, of course, to get our fleet out to sea, reinforced as much as practicable, by our reserve ships; and to get the coast-guard on their patrol stations. As we should not know the destination of the enemy, we should either have to assume a destination and send our fleet to that place (leaving the other places undefended) or else send our fleet out to sea to some position from which it would despatch scouts in different directions to intercept the enemy, in order that our fleet might meet it and prevent its farther advance. Of course, the latter procedure could not be carried out reasonably, unless we had a great enough number of trained scouts to make the interception of the enemy fleet probable; because otherwise the probabilities would be that an enemy having the battle cruisers and scouts that European navies have, would succeed in evading our fleet and landing a force upon our shores; and it could not be carried out reasonably either, if we knew that our fleet was markedly inferior to the coming fleet; because to send out our fleet to meet a much more powerful one in actual battle would be to commit national suicide by the most expeditious method. In case the departure of the enemy fleet occurred in the stormy months of the winter, we might feel warranted in guessing that its immediate destination was the Caribbean; yet if our fleet were in the Caribbean at the time, and if our coast lacked shore defenses as at present, we might argue that the enemy would take the opportunity to make a direct descent upon our coast, seize a base--say on the eastern end of Long Island--and march directly on New York. It would be very difficult to plan the development of a line of scouts in such a way that the scouts would intercept an attack directed at some unknown point between Boston and the West Indies, perhaps in the southern part of the West Indies--say Margarita Island. In fact, it would be impossible; with the result that, unless we intercepted it by simple good luck, the enemy would succeed in landing a force on our eastern coast, or else in the seizing of a base in the West Indies or the southern part of the Caribbean Sea. Either one of these acts, successfully performed by an enemy, would give him an advantage; that is, it would make his position relatively to ours better than it was before. It would have the same effect, therefore, as winning a battle; in fact it would constitute the winning of a battle--not a physical battle but a strategic battle. It may be objected that, unless we knew our fleet to be more powerful it would be wiser and more comfortable for all concerned to withdraw our ships to the shelter of their bases, and let the enemy do his worst--on the theory that he could not do anything else so ruinous to us as to sink our fleet.