y fortifications than by a good
fleet and, as Pepys noted, were 'not ashamed of it.' The truth
is that neither the king nor the duke believed in the power of
a navy to ward off attack from an island. This may have been
due to want of intellectual capacity; but it would be going a
long way to put it down to personal wickedness. They have had
many imitators, some in our own day. The huge forts which stud
the coast of the United Kingdom, and have been erected within
the memory of the present generation, are monuments, likely to
last for many years, of the inability of people, whom no one
could accuse of being vicious, to rate sea-power at its proper
value. It is much more likely that it was owing to a reluctance
to study questions of naval defence as industriously as they
deserved, and to that moral timidity which so often tempts even
men of proved physical courage to undertake the impossible task
of making themselves absolutely safe against hostile efforts
at every point.

Charles II has also been charged with indifference to the interests
of his country, or worse, because during a great naval war he
adopted the plan of trying to weaken the enemy by destroying
his commerce. The king 'took a fatal resolution of laying up
his great ships and keeping only a few frigates on the cruise.'
It is expressly related that this was not Charles's own idea,
but that it was urged upon him by advisers whose opinion probably
seemed at the time as well worth listening to as that of others.
Anyhow, if the king erred, as he undoubtedly did, he erred in
good company. Fourteen hundred years earlier the statesmen who
conducted the great war against Carthage, and whose astuteness
has been the theme of innumerable panegyrics since, took the same
'fatal resolution.' In the midst of the great struggle they 'did
away with the fleet. At the most they encouraged privateering; and
with that view placed the war-vessels of the State at the disposal
of captains who were ready to undertake a corsair warfare on
their own account.'[41] In much later times this method has had
many and respectable defenders. Mahan's works are, in a sense, a
formal warning to his fellow-citizens not to adopt it. In France,
within the last years of the nineteenth century, it found, and
appears still to find, adherents enough to form a school. The
reappearance of belief in demonstrated impossibilities is a
recognised incident in human history; but it is usually confined
to th