The ability to deny to the enemy the use of the sea for the movement of armies and supplies, while enjoying it for your own, would continue to be the… - Arthur Bryant

Before the British regiment of the line is sacrificed to logistics—if sacrificed it is to be—I should like to put on record a historian's conviction that the greatness of our infantry soldier in the past, as in the present, has been due primarily to the fact that in the regiment, with its personal pride, loyalties, and traditions, the individualistic and liberty-loving qualities of the Briton have found their natural medium in war.

Loving private liberty, yet finding that it could not exist without public order, the English devoted themselves to making the two compatible. Freedom within a framework of discipline became their ideal. They achieved it through the sovereignty of the law. "All our struggles for liberty," wrote Disraeli, "smack of law." And by law the English meant an enforceable compact between themselves and their rulers, deriving not from unilaterally imposed force, but from assent freely given. Both they and their American descendants constituted such law, rather than the Executive, their ultimate sovereign.

The English were what they were because they had long wished to be. Their tradition derived from the Catholic past of Europe. Its purpose was to make Christian men—gentle, generous, humble, valiant and chivalrous. Its ideals were justice, mercy and charity.