read:--

"The event shows that mere material equality is but as dust in the
balance when weighed in the day of battle against superiority of
moral equipment."

--Which, when you come to think of it, is precisely what Bacon meant when
he wrote:--

"Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of Horse,
Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery and the like: all
this is but a Sheep in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition
of the People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) in Armies
importeth not much where the People is of weake Courage: For
(as _Virgil_ saith) _it never troubles a Wolfe how many the Sheepe
be_."

Do our friends of the Navy League seriously believe that a principle as
old as humankind can be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine or
of some novelty in guns? Even in their notions of what material strength
means I hold them to be mistaken. The last resource which a nation ought
to neglect is its financial credit. It was Walpole's long policy of peace
which made possible Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger
conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a nation's cowardice to
raise money for its protection. An old text, my masters! It seems a long
while that some of us were preaching it in vain until Admiral Togo came
along and proved it.

I observe that a Member of Parliament for a West of England constituency
(a better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments
with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes
write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs.
My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province
of a man of letters consider him worthy to pay income-tax.

I pass over some tempting reflections on the queer anomaly that this
prohibition should be addressed (as it so often is) by writers to writers,
by newspaper writers to men who write books, and (so far as a distinction
can be drawn) by men who write in a hurry to men who write deliberately.
I wish to look quietly into the belief on which it rests and to inquire
how that belief was come by.

There certainly was a time when such a belief would have been laughed at
as scarcely reasonable enough to be worth discussing. And that time,
oddly enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest era of the
world's literature, the greatest era o