The bigger nations are armed, not so much because they look for the spoils of war, as because they wish to prevent the horrors of it; arms are for defence.[111]
And here is the London Times:
No doubt the victor suffers, but who suffers most, he or the vanquished?"[112]
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.