Let us hope it will not come to the birth too late.
Here concludes the general discussion of the principal elements which affect, favorably or unfavorably, the growth of sea power in nations.
The aim has been, first to consider those elements in their natural tendency for or against, and then to illustrate by particular examples and by the experience of the past.

Such discussions, while undoubtedly embracing a wider field, yet fall mainly within the province of strategy, as distinguished from tactics.

The considerations and principles which enter into them belong to the unchangeable, or unchanging, order of things, remaining the same, in cause and effect, from age to age.

They belong, as it were, to the Order of Nature, of whose stability so much is heard in our day; whereas tactics, using as its instruments the weapons made by man, shares in the change and progress of the race from generation to generation.

From time to time the superstructure of tactics has to be altered or wholly torn down; but the old foundations of strategy so far remain, as though laid upon a rock.