axiom of professional experience, that as the
military tone of the sea-officers rises, the effect will be transmitted
to those civil functions upon which efficiency for war antecedently
depends. Still, substantially, the weapons of war were in principle, and
consequently in general methods of handling, the same at the end of the
period as at the beginning. They were intrinsically more efficient; but
the great gain was not in them, but in the spirit and intellectual grasp
of the men who wielded them. There was no change in the least analogous
to that from oars to sails, or from sails to steam.

Under such conditions of continued similarity in means, advance in the
practice of any profession is effected rather in the realm of ideas, in
intellectual processes; and even their expert application involves mind
rather than matter. In the nineteenth century such intellectual
processes have been largely devoted to the purposes of material
development, and have found their realization, in the navy as elsewhere,
in revolutionizing instruments, in providing means never before
attainable. The railroad, the steamer, the electric telegraph, find
their counterpart in the heavily armored steamship of war. But in
utilizing these new means the navy must still be governed by the ideas,
which are, indeed, in many ways as old as military history, but which in
the beginning of the eighteenth century had passed out of the minds of
naval men. It was the task of the officers of that period to recall
them, to formulate them anew, to give them a living hold upon the theory
and practice of the profession. This they did, and they were undoubtedly
helped in so doing by the fact that their attention was not diverted and
absorbed, as that of our day very largely has been, by decisive changes
in the instruments with which their ideas were to be given effect. Thus
they were able to make a substantial and distinctive contribution to the
art of naval warfare, and that on its highest side. For the artist is
greater than his materials, the warrior than his arms; and it was in the
man rather than in his weapons that the navy of the eighteenth century
wrought its final conspicuous triumph.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This wording and punctuation is exact from the text.

[2] So far was literalism carried, that, before the signal for battle,
Byng evened numbers with his opponent by directing his weakest ship to
leave the line, with no other orders than to be ready to t