The practical benefits, whatever the correlative drawbacks, are equally clear, nor are they less great now than they appeared to Howe and Kempenfelt.  We avoid exhaustion of machinery, coal, and men, and this, at least for the necessary flotilla screen, will be greater than anything that had to be faced in former days.  We have at least the opportunity of occupying a position secure from surprise, and of keeping the fleet continually up to its highest striking energy.  Finally, assuming the geographical conditions give reasonable promise of contact, a quick decision, which modern war demands with ever greater insistence, is more probable.  In such a disposition of course contact can rarely be made certain.  The enemy, whom the hypothesis of blockade assumes to be anxious to avoid action, will always have a chance of evasion, but this will always be so, even with the closest blockade now possible.  We may even go further and claim for open blockade that in favourable conditions it may give the better chance of contact.  For by adopting the principle of open blockade we shall have, in accordance with the theory of defence, the further advantages of being able the better to conceal our dispositions, and consequently to lay traps for our enemy, such as that which Nelson prepared for Villeneuve in the Gulf of Lyons in 1805.

The objection to such a course which appears to have the most weight with current opinion is the moral one, which is inseparable from all deliberate choices of the defensive.  If the watching fleet remains in a home fortified base, it may be assumed that the usual moral degradation will set in.  But the method does not entail the inglorious security of such a base.  A sound position may well be found at a spot such as Admiral Togo occupied while waiting for the Baltic fleet, and in that case there was no observable degradation of any kind.  Nor is there much evidence that this objection weighed materially with the opponents of Howe’s view.  Their objection was of a purely physical kind.  Open blockade left the enemy too much freedom to raid our trade routes.  The watching system might be sufficient to keep an unwilling battle-fleet in port or to bring a more adventurous one to action, but it could not control raiding squadrons.  This was certainly Barham’s objection.  “If,” he wrote to Pitt in 1794, “the French should have any intention of sending their fleet to sea with this easterly wind, and Lord Howe continues at Torbay, our Mediterranean and Jamaica convoys are in a very critical situation.  Both fleets must by this time be drawing near the Channel, and cannot enter it while the easterly wind holds.”  This danger must always be with us, especially in narrow waters such as the North Sea.  In more open theatres the difficulty is not so obtrusive, for with sufficient sea room trade may take naturally or by direction a course which our watching dispositions will cover.  Thus with Nelson in the case of Toulon, his normal positions on the Sardinian coast covered effectually the flow of our trade to the Levant and the Two Sicilies, which was all there was at the time.