There is also another reason for this supremacy; arising from the fact, that England may throw her whole national force into a navy; while other powers, however ambitious of naval eminence, must at least divide their force between the land and sea services. France, with its immense frontier, must keep up an immense army during war. Russia, with a frontier from the Niemen to the North Pole, must keep up an immense army at all times. The maintenance of those armies is essential to the national existence, while the maintenance of a fleet is only gratifying to the national ambition. The consequence is as clear as a matter of arithmetic. France and Russia, attacking England separately, must be ultimately beaten. America, even if she were a more formidable opponent than either, will also be beaten, and for the same reason. A fleet is not essential to her; the undivided force of the States will never be applied to her navy. The national strength will be expanded over inland conquest; the sea-coast towns will be rapidly reduced to insignificance by the superiority of the great inland settlements; and the time will come, when the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, will have no more weight with the inland powers of Louisiana and the prairies, than Brighton or Broadstairs have with the power of London. They will be watering places, or, at best, warehousing places, and will be no more able to keep up a navy, than the Isle of Thanet would be able to keep up the Channel fleet. All this, however, tends only to show, that a fleet is the supreme instrument of British dominion; and that its strength, its skill, and its discipline, should employ the utmost activity, liberality, and vigilance of every Cabinet which desires to do its duty to the empire.
We now proceed to give some account of the interesting and intelligent work of which Captain Plunket has supplied the translation, accompanied with valuable explanatory notes of his own.
Some time since, there appeared in the well-known Parisian Revue des deux Mondes, articles on the English and French naval systems, by a French officer, Captain de la Gravière. The object of those papers was less to give a history of the naval war, than to ascertain the causes of that almost unbroken series of triumphs which made the fame of the British fleet; and, on the other hand, which ultimately extinguished the fleet of a nation so brave, ambitious, and enterprising as the French.
M. de la Gravière, to his credit, had not followed the usual "perfide Albion" style of the French journalists, nor exhibited that jesuitical evasion of fact, and the perpetual peevishness against England, which marks and disgraces French history. He never sinks English success into failure, or inflates French failure into victory. He writes with the calmness of a man in search of the truth; judges with every visible intention of impartiality; examines the private documents of the transactions; and pronounces a judgment which, though obviously and essentially French, is perhaps as honest an effort in pursuit of the reality of things, as is compatible with the nature of our clever and lively libellers on the other side of the Channel.
Those volumes begin by some striking remarks of Napoleon at St Helena. This extraordinary man never spoke of his defeat at Acre in 1799 but with bitter regret. He declared that it was his intention, had he taken that fortress, to have marched to Constantinople at the head of the tribes of Mount Lebanon, or to have followed the steps of Alexander to the Indus. His repulse from Acre, he always said, "marred his destiny."
All this verbiage of the great Captain, however, has been sufficiently exposed by the actual event. He could no more have marched to Constantinople than he could have marched to the Indus, nor have marched to the Indus more than he could have marched to the Pole star. With but 40,000 men, (the whole number which landed in Egypt,) it would have been utterly impossible for him to have carried a force through Syria and Asia Minor equal to the attack on Constantinople—even if the Russians were not at hand. The march to the Indus would have lain through the deserts of Arabia and Persia, and have stripped him down to a corporal's guard before he had got half-way. A French foot would never have been dipt in that far-famed river, which is now a British Canal. The tribes of Lebanon would no more have recruited his ranks, than they would have given him their sequins. His destiny lay in another direction. No man knew this better; and doubtless he rejoiced, when he found himself on board the frigate carrying him westward, and relieving him of the "glory" of being slaughtered by the Arabs, and embalmed by the sands.
But the inveterate hostility of Napoleon seemed to rage against England, with the ravening of a mad dog, who dies biting the club which has laid him on the ground. All his anti-English policy was a succession of gross and ruinous blunders. To assail England without a fleet was naturally impossible. To form a fleet for the purpose of assailing her was, therefore, always a new temptation. If, after the First of June, which destroyed the Channel fleet of France, and the burning of the arsenals of Toulon, which destroyed her Mediterranean fleet, France had never built another vessel beyond the tonnage of a coaster, she would have shown her good sense. But Napoleon, when in the plenitude of power, went on building huge vessels, only to see them sent into English ports.
The waste of time, waste of thought, and waste of money, on those projects of English invasion, were among the most capital faults of his extravagant career. He might have made France the great corn country, or the great garden of Europe, with half the sums which he threw away only to be beaten. His fifty ships of the line which were to sweep the Channel, in the absence of our fleet—his one hundred and twenty thousand men on the shore of Boulogne—all only enhanced the naval glory of the great commander; who, after pursuing the French flying squadron of eighteen great ships, with ten, to the West Indies, finished in one day the naval war, extinguished the existence of the French and Spanish navies, and crowned his own gallant career.
The impolicy of these attempts was equally exhibited in another form—they stimulated at once the power and the spirit of England. The monotony of a war of defence would have disgusted the gallantry of the nation, but the victories of the British navy continually cheered the people under the burdens of the war. What minister could have dared to propose a "compromising" peace, on the day after the battle of the Nile? What minister would have dared to propose any peace on the day after Trafalgar? The war, too, broke down more than the French fleet—it buried the Opposition.
The French author divides his history into three periods—the first, that of the battles of Howe and Hood, of Hotham and Bridport; the second, that of Jervis; the third, (from 1798 to 1805) belonging to Nelson, without an equal, without even a competitor—the most glorious series of successes ever won on the ocean.