Page 307 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

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Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. 285

facilitates comprehension, which is baffled by a
multiplication of minutiae, just as the impres-
sion of a work of art, or of a story, is lost amid
a multiplicity of figures or of actors. The in-
vestigation precedent to formulation of ideas
must be close and minute, but that done, the
unbiassed selection of the most important,
expressed graphically by a few lines and a few
dots, leads most certainly to the comprehension
of decisive relations in a military field of action.
In the United States, Pensacola and the
Mississippi River have been rivals for the pos-
session of a navy-yard. The recent decision
of a specially appointed board in favor of the
latter, while it commands the full assent of the
writer, by no means eliminates the usefulness
of the former. Taken together, they fulfil a
fair requirement of strategy, sea and land, that
operations based upon a national frontier,
which a coast-line is, should not depend upon
a single place only. They are closer together
than ideal perfection would wish ; too easily,
therefore, to be watched by an enemy without
great dispersal of his force, which Norfolk and
New York, for instance, are not ; but still, con-
jointly, they are the best we can do on that