n actively at work, exaggerating or
distorting, hastily waiving aside permanent truth in favor of temporary
prepossessions or accidental circumstance? It is at least equally likely
that the naval world at the present time is hugging some fond delusions
in the excessive size and speed to which battle-ships are tending, and
in the disproportionate weight assigned to the defensive as compared to
the offensive factors in a given aggregate tonnage. Imagination, theory,
_a priori_ reasoning, is here at variance with rational historical
precedent, which has established the necessity of numbers as well as of
individual power in battle-ships, and demonstrated the superiority of
offensive over defensive strength in military systems. These--and
other--counterbalancing considerations have in past wars enforced the
adoption of a medium homogeneous type, as conducive both to adequate
numbers,--which permit the division of the fleet when required for
strategic or tactical purposes,--and also directly to offensive fleet
strength by the greater facility of manoeuvring possessed by such
vessels; for the strength of a fleet lies not chiefly in the single
units, but in their mutual support in elastic and rapid movement. Well
tested precedent--experience--has here gone to the wall in favor of an
untried forecast of supposed fundamental change in conditions. But
experience is uncommonly disagreeable when she revenges herself after
her own fashion.

The British Navy of the eighteenth century in this way received an
unpleasant proof of the faultiness of its then accepted conclusions, in
the miscarriages of Mathews off Toulon, in 1744, and of Byng off
Minorca, in 1756. So fixed were men's habits of thought that the lessons
were not at once understood. As evidenced by the distribution of
censure, the results were attributed by contemporary judges to
particular incidents of each battle, not to the erroneous underlying
general plans, contravening all sound military precedent, which from the
first made success improbable, indeed impossible, except by an
inefficiency of the enemy which was not to be presumed. These battles
therefore are important, militarily, in a sense not at all dependent
upon their consequences, which were ephemeral. They are significant as
extreme illustrations of incompetent action, deriving from faulty
traditions; and they have the further value of showing the starting
point, the zero of the scale, from which the progress of t