t, I correctly
understand that word. Putting it afterwards before a body of officers
attending the College course, all men of years and experience, one
said to me, derisively, "Do you suppose an enemy would let you do
that?" "It is a question of how quick he is," I replied. "In these
days of twelve or fifteen knots he will have no time to ponder, and
scarcely time to act." The query illustrates a habit of mind
frequently met. It is like discussing the merits of a thrust _en
carte_. If the other man is quick enough, he will parry; if not, he
will be run through: sooner or later the more skilful usually will get
in.

Naval history gave me more anxiety, and I afterwards found it was that
which Luce particularly desired of me. I shared the prepossession,
common at that time, that the naval history of the past was wholly
past; of no use at all to the present. I well recall, during my first
term at the College, a visit from a reporter of one of the principal
New York journals. He was a man of rotund presence, florid face,
thrown-back head, and flowing hair, with all that magisterial
condescension which the environment of the Fourth Estate nourishes in
its fortunate members; the Roman citizen was "not in it" for
birthright. To my bad luck a plan of Trafalgar hung in evidence, as he
stalked from room to room. "Ah," he said, with superb up-to-date pity,
"you are still talking about Trafalgar;" and I could see that
Trafalgar and I were thenceforth on the top shelf of fossils in the
collections of his memory. This point of view was held by very many.
"You won't find much to say about history," was the direct
discouraging comment of an older officer. On the other hand, Sir
Geoffrey Hornby, less well known in this country than in Great
Britain, where twenty years ago he was recognized as the head of the
profession, distinctly commended to me the present value of naval
history. I myself, as I have just confessed, had had the contrary
impression--a tradition passively accepted. Thus my mind was troubled
how to establish relations between yesterday and to-day; so wholly
ignorant was I of the undying reproduction of conditions in their
essential bearings--a commonplace of military art.

He who seeks, finds, if he does not lose heart; and to me,
continuously seeking, came from within the suggestion that control of
the sea was an historic factor which had never been systematically
appreciated and expounded. Once formulated consciously,