None of our great wars was won by cleverness; they were all won by resolution and perseverance.  In all of them we were near to despair and did not despair.  In all of them we won through to victory in the end.

But in none of them did victory come in the expected shape.  The worst of making elaborate plans of victory, and programmes of all that is to follow victory, is that the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans.  Not every war finds its decision in a single great battle.  Think of our war with Spain in the sixteenth century.  Spain was then the greatest of European Powers.  She had larger armies than we could raise; she had more than our wealth, and more than our shipping.  The newly discovered continent of America was an appanage of Spain, and her great galleons were wafted lazily to and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the western hemisphere.  We defeated her by standing out and holding on.  We fought her in the Low Countries, which she enslaved and oppressed.  We refused to recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our merchant seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have kept it for the last three years.  When at last we became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she collected a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us; and it was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the sailors of England, in 1588.  The defeat of the Armada was the turning-point of the war, but it was not the end.  It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts of the people, as a great shadow of fear has already been lifted from their hearts in the present War, but during the years that followed we suffered many and serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace and security were reached.  So late as 1601, thirteen years after the defeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark offered to mediate between England and Spain, so that the long and disastrous war might be ended.  Queen Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she said—­and if you want to understand why she was almost adored by her people, listen to her words:  ’I would have the King of Denmark, and all Princes Christian and Heathen to know, that England hath no need to crave peace; nor myself endured one hour’s fear since I attained the crown thereof, being guarded with so valiant and faithful subjects.’  In the end the power and menace of Spain faded away, and when peace was made, in 1604, this nation never again, from that day to this, feared the worst that Spain could do.

What were our gains from the war with Spain?  Freedom to live our lives in our own way, unthreatened; freedom to colonize America.  The gains of a great war are never visible immediately; they are deferred, and extended over many years.  What did we gain by our war with Napoleon, which ended in the victory of Waterloo?  For long years after Waterloo this country was full of riots and discontents; there were rick-burnings, agitations, popular risings, and something very near to famine in the land.  But all these