en
co-extensive with the frontier line threatened, finds its natural
outcome in a system of defence by very small vessels, in great
numbers, capable of minute subdivision and wide dispersal, to which an
equal tonnage locked up in larger ships cannot be subjected. Although
St. Vincent was at the head of the Admiralty which in 1801 ordered
that Nelson should first organize such a flotilla, and only after that
proceed to offensive measures, the results of his experience now were
to form--or at the least to confirm in him--the conclusion which he
enunciated, and to which he persistently held, during the later truly
formidable preparations of Napoleon. "Our great reliance is on the
vigilance and activity of our cruisers at sea, any reduction in the
number of which, by applying them to guard our ports, inlets, and
beaches, would in my judgment tend to our destruction." Very
strangely, so far as the author's opinion goes, Nelson afterwards
expressed an apparently contrary view, and sustained Mr. Pitt in his
attack upon St. Vincent's administration on this very point; an
attack, in its tendency and in the moment chosen, among the most
dangerous to his country ever attempted by a great and sagacious
statesman. Nelson, however, writing in May, 1804, says: "I had wrote a
memoir, many months ago, upon the propriety of a flotilla. I had that
command at the end of the last war, and I know the necessity of it,
even had you, and which you ought to have, thirty or forty sail of the
line in the Downs and North Sea, besides frigates &c.; but having
failed so entirely in submitting my mind upon three points I was
disheartened." This Memoir has not been preserved, but it will be
noticed that, in expressing his difference from St. Vincent in the
words quoted, he assumes, what did not at any time exist, thirty or
forty sail-of-the-line for the North Sea and the Downs. St. Vincent's
stand was taken on the position that the flotilla could not be manned
without diminishing the cruisers in commission, which were far short
of the ideal number named by Nelson. It may be believed, or at least
hoped, that if forced to choose between the two, as St. Vincent was,
his choice would have been that of the great Earl. It seems clear,
however, that in 1804 he believed it possible that the Army of
Invasion _might_ get as far as the shores of England--a question which
has been much argued. "I am very uneasy," he then wrote to Lady
Hamilton, "at your and Horati