e United States Navy,
namely, the destruction of the enemy's commerce. With divisions
permanently constituted as such, propriety and effective action would
have required the additional dignity for the officer in general
charge, and they themselves doubtless would have asked for it; but for
ships temporarily associated, and liable at any moment to be
scattered, not only was the simple seniority of naval rank sufficient,
but more would have been inexpedient. The commodores, now such only by
courtesy and temporary circumstance, would suffer no derogation if
deprived of ships other than their own; whereas the more extensive
function, similarly curtailed, would become a mere empty show, a
humiliation which no office, civil or military, can undergo without
harm.

This indecision of the Department reflected the varying opinions of
the higher officers of the service, which in turn but reproduced
different schools of thought throughout all navies. Historically, as a
military operation, for the injury of an enemy's commerce and the
protection of one's own, it may be considered fairly demonstrated that
vessels grouped do more effective work than the same number scattered.
This is, of course, but to repeat the general military teaching of
operations of all kinds. It is not the keeping of the several vessels
side by side that constitutes the virtue of this disposition; it is
the placing them under a single head, thereby insuring co-operation,
however widely dispersed by their common chief under the emergency of
successive moments. Like a fan that opens and shuts, vessels thus
organically bound together possess the power of wide sweep, which
insures exertion over a great field of ocean, and at the same time
that of mutual support, because dependent upon and controlled from a
common centre. Such is concentration, reasonably understood; not
huddled together like a drove of cattle, but distributed with a regard
to a common purpose, and linked together by the effectual energy of a
single will.

There is, however, in the human mind an inveterate tendency to
dispersion of effort, due apparently to the wish to do at once as many
things as may be; a disposition also to take as many chances as
possible in an apparent lottery, with the more hope that some one of
them will come up successful. Not an aggregate big result, and one
only, whether hit or miss, but a division of resources and powers
which shall insure possible compensation in one