maintain the
'_greatest circumspection_,' as though in war half measures have
not always led to disasters. So, too, the orders given to our
squadron chiefs were to keep the sea as long as possible,
without engaging in actions which might cause the loss of
vessels difficult to replace; so that more than once complete
victories, which would have crowned the skill of our admirals
and the courage of our captains, were changed into successes of
little importance. A system which laid down as a principle that
an admiral should not use the force in his hands, which sent him
against the enemy with the foreordained purpose of receiving
rather than making the attack, a system which sapped moral power
to save material resources, must have unhappy results.... It is
certain that this deplorable system was one of the causes of the
lack of discipline and startling defections which marked the
periods of Louis XVI., of the [first] Republic, and of the
[first] Empire."[12]

Within ten years of the peace of 1783 came the French Revolution; but
that great upheaval which shook the foundations of States, loosed the
ties of social order, and drove out of the navy nearly all the trained
officers of the monarchy who were attached to the old state of things,
did not free the French navy from a false system. It was easier to
overturn the form of government than to uproot a deep-seated
tradition. Hear again a third French officer, of the highest rank and
literary accomplishments, speaking of the inaction of Villeneuve, the
admiral who commanded the French rear at the battle of the Nile, and
who did not leave his anchors while the head of the column was being
destroyed:--

"A day was to come [Trafalgar] in which Villeneuve in his turn,
like De Grasse before him, and like Duchayla, would complain of
being abandoned by part of his fleet. We have come to suspect
some secret reason for this fatal coincidence. It is not natural
that among so many honorable men there should so often be found
admirals and captains incurring such a reproach. If the name of
some of them is to this very day sadly associated with the
memory of our disasters, we may be sure the fault is not wholly
their own. We must rather blame the nature of the operations in
which they were engaged, and that system of defensive war
prescribed by the French government, which Pitt, in