nt
upon inactivity and national neglect, was to stagnation, to obviate
which no provision existed or was attempted. Self-improvement was not a
note of the service, nor of the times. The stimulus of occupation and
the corrective of experience being removed, average men stuck where they
were, and grew old in a routine of service, or, what was perhaps worse,
out of the service in all but name. In naval warfare, the Battle of
Malaga, the last point of performance, remained the example, and the
Fighting Instructions the passively accepted authority. The men at the
head of the Navy, to whom the country naturally looked, either had no
record--no proof of fitness--because but youths in the last war, or
else, in simple consequence of having then had a chance to show
themselves, were now superannuated. This very fact, however, had the
singular and unfortunate result that, because the officers of reputation
were old, men argued, by a curious perversion of thought, that none but
the old should be trusted.

Of this two significant cases will tell more than many words. Mathews,
who commanded at Toulon in 1744, was then sixty-seven years old, and had
not been at sea between 1724 and 1742. Hawke, in 1747, when he had
already established an excellent reputation as a captain, and for
enterprise in recent battle, was thought young to be entrusted with a
squadron of a dozen ships-of-the-line, although he was forty-two,--two
years older than Nelson at the Nile, but four years younger than
Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo, and one year less in age than Grant
at the close of the American Civil War. Such instances are not of
merely curious interest; they are symptoms of professional states of
mind, of a perplexity and perversion of standards which work
disastrously whenever war succeeds to a prolonged period of peace, until
experience has done its work by sorting out the unsound from among the
fair-seeming, and has shown also that men may be too old as well as too
young for unaccustomed responsibility. The later prevalence of juster
views was exemplified in the choice of Wolfe, who was but thirty-two
when he fell before Quebec in 1759, charged with one of the most
difficult enterprises that had then been entrusted to a British general.

It is these two factors, therefore, an erroneous standard and a
lethargic peace, which principally caused the weakness of the British
official staff for battle service at the period of lowest descent, which