History is a record of exploded ideas. In what sense? Fighting conditions are all altered. The wind formerly determined the course of action; now it is only the mind of man. One man and the best man is wanted—not a fossil; not a careful man. Fleets were formerly days coming into action, now only minutes.
Two Fleets can now be fighting each other in twenty minutes from first seeing each other’s smoke.
Formerly sea battles were Sailors’ battles, now they are Officers’.
At Trafalgar, Nelson was walking up and down the Quarter-Deck and having a yarn with his Flag Captain, Hardy, at the very zenith of the Action! It was the common sailors only who were then at work. How different now! The Admiral everything!
Now, the different phases of a Naval War are as capable of as exact a demonstration as a proposition in Euclid, because steam has annihilated wind and sea. We are now trained to a higher standard, and the arts of strategy and tactics have accordingly been immensely magnified. Make an initial mistake in strategy or tactics, and then it may be said of them as of women by Congreve:
“Hell has no fury like a woman scorn’d.”
The last place to defend England will be the Shores of England.
The Frontiers of England are the Coasts of the Enemy. We ought to be there five minutes before war breaks out.
Naval Supremacy once destroyed is destroyed for ever. Carthage, Spain, Holland, the great commercial nations of the past, had the sea wrested from them, and then they fell.
A successful Mercantile Marine leads to a successful War Navy.