1812,
had come out of the great European conflict unshaken and indeed
more preeminent than ever. The words used, half a century before
by a writer in the great French 'Encyclopedie,' seemed more exact
than when first written. '_L'empire_des_mers_,' he says, is,
'le plus avantageux de tous les empires; les Phoeniciens le
possedoient autre fois et c'est aux Anglois que cette gloire
appartient aujourd'hui sur toutes les puissances maritimes.'[47]
Vast out-lying territories had been acquired or were more firmly
held, and the communications of all the over-sea dominions of the
British Crown were secured against all possibility of serious
menace for many years to come. Our sea-power was so ubiquitous
and all-pervading that, like the atmosphere, we rarely thought
of it and rarely remembered its necessity or its existence. It
was not till recently that the greater part of the nation--for
there were many, and still are some exceptions--perceived that
it was the medium apart from which the British Empire could no
more live than it could have grown up. Forty years after the
fall of Napoleon we found ourselves again at war with a great
power. We had as our ally the owner of the greatest navy in the
world except our own. Our foe, as regards his naval forces, came
the next in order. Yet so overwhelming was the strength of Great
Britain and France on the sea that Russia never attempted to
employ her navy against them. Not to mention other expeditions,
considerable enough in themselves, military operations on the
largest scale were undertaken, carried on for many months, and
brought to a successful termination on a scene so remote that
it was two thousand miles from the country of one, and three
thousand from that of the other partner in the alliance. 'The
stream of supplies and reinforcements, which in terms of modern
war is called "communications,", was kept free from even the threat
of molestation, not by visible measures, but by the undisputed
efficacy of a real, though imperceptible sea-power. At the close
of the Russian war we encountered, and unhappily for us in
influential positions, men who, undismayed by the consequences
of mimicking in free England the cast-iron methods of the Great
Frederick, began to measure British requirements by standards
borrowed from abroad and altogether inapplicable to British
conditions. Because other countries wisely abstained from relying
on that which they did not possess, or had only imperfec