it is only the other belligerent that would have this power of declaring such and such things to be contraband, while England herself would have no voice in the matter. It is apparently altogether forgotten that the final and only fully adequate authority in such a matter is a Prize Court, administering, not the municipal laws of its country, still less the desires of its government, but the Law of Nations; and that no mere declaration by a belligerent of what is or what is not contraband is of any avail unless and until it is affirmed and confirmed by the reasoned decision of a duly constituted Prize Court. Thus the French contention that rice was contraband of war during the French operations in Tonkin in 1884 remains a contention only, for it was never brought to the test of a Prize Court decision.

What is certain is that all these wild imaginings would disappear at the first touch of naval war; that there would thereupon immediately ensue the old unavoidable respect for, reliance upon and appeal to, the Law of Nations, the Rules of Warfare, and the authority of Prize Courts as expounders of both.

A long peace has also given rise to some strange new ideas; not alone of the laws, but also of the practice of warfare, such as had never before been conceived, and could hardly have been conceived now but for the long absence of experience in the effect of actual fighting upon actual men, coupled with an exaggerated belief in the power of the greatly perfected modern naval armaments and defences to change, not merely the conditions of naval warfare, which they certainly must do, but Human Nature itself, which they as certainly will not and cannot do.

Thus naval officers, serving in the very latest and finest battleships, are heard to profess the belief that

from a modern naval action none of them will come out alive. Nevertheless, the teaching of all history is that the effect of improved armaments has always hitherto been not to increase but to diminish the loss of life in battle; and this for the very sufficient reason that, so long as men are men, their unconquerable tendency must and will be to fight at a greater distance from an enemy's gun the straighter that gun shoots and the more harm it does. Improvement in weapons has always hitherto meant increase in fighting distances, and of two combatants one at least will, and the other must, observe the rule. Thus the first great naval action between England and France, fought by Edward III. in 1340 at Sluys, in which bills and swords, bows and arrows played the chief part, resulted, as contemporary chroniclers say, in the slaughter of 30,000 Frenchmen, and the land battle of Crecy, six years later, in a similar number of slain-a degree of loss which has never been equalled or even approached in single battles since firearms were used, and which has steadily diminished in proportion to the perfection attained therein, so that neither the battle of the Nile nor that of Trafalgar will at all compare with Sluys in the number of slain, any more than Blenheim or Waterloo will compare with Crecy.

Again, it is often assumed that, as a rule, all naval actions will in future be "fought to a finish," that, generally speaking, all the vessels engaged will hold out to the very last, and that most of them will be sunk. Here again the experience of actual war leads to an opposite conclusion; and unless we are to believe that human nature has wholly changed, we must expect in the future what has always happened in the past that, in the vast majority of cases, and

apart from accident, ships will surrender before they sink; that there will still be, as there always has been, a point beyond which human endurance cannot go; that when this point has been reached and overpassed, the flag will be hauled down without further resistance; and that when a certain amount of damage has been done to a ship and her armament, and a certain degree of loss inflicted on her crew, that ship will certainly rather surrender than sink, in the attempt to prolong a struggle now become equally hopeless and useless.

As a corollary to this, the notion seems to be generally prevalent that the only object that should be, or that need be entertained in naval warfare, is to sink and destroy the enemy, whereas in real warfare it was always recognized that a preferable object was to defeat, preserve, and capture him, and that only when this was impracticable was it necessary to seek to sink and destroy him. The effect of capture is twofold that of destruction; for the latter only deprives the enemy of ship and crew, whereas the former both does that and brings them into the victor's possession for use, adds prize to victory, gives prisoners for exchange, effects a greater result with a less loss of life to the vanquished, produces a far greater moral effect to the advantage of the captor and the disadvantage of the captured, and so does far more to bring the war towards a conclusion by the submission of the enemy.

Another new notion of a still stranger nature has so taken possession of the naval mind, that whole flotillas have been built in the belief of its soundness, and elaborate systems of harbour-defence constructed to provide against these flotillas. This is the notion that warlike operations of the deadliest kind may

reasonably and advantageously be conducted by vessels of war without even previously ascertaining, of a certainty, whether those against whom they are directed are friends or foes. It is upon this notion, and upon this alone, that the whole conception of torpedo-boats and of torpedo warfare, as conducted by those boats, can alone rest. The torpedo-boat claims to be a vessel of war, and her officers and crew would undoubtedly, in case of capture, expect and claim (what could hardly be denied to them) honourable treatment as prisoners of war. Yet the assumption upon which alone she can be expected to succeed, or even to come near to success, in her deadly work, is that she is to adopt a course of action wholly unlike that of a vessel of war-that she is to hoist no true colours, fire no affirming gun, nor even answer any hail, but is secretly to creep in unannounced, unheard, unseen, to discharge her torpedoes, and to fly for her life. Her methods are essentially those of the cloaked midnight assassin, not those of the man-of-war; and since, in the case of the assassin, it is essential that he should assure himself that the victim he dogs with his silent, upraised dagger is really his enemy and not his friend, since it is even more essential in his case than in the case of the open fighter, that before he strikes he should be sure, so is it equally essential in the case of the torpedoboat; for a mistake once made cannot be rectified or remedied. Yet the notion obtains that the business of the torpedo-boat is, if she can, to sink any battleship she meets at sea and takes for a foe, without previously verifying of a certainty whether it is a a friend or a foe. Verification, it is truly enough said, would involve the disclosure of herself and of her own character; and since, if she is once seen and

recognized, she would in all probability be herself destroyed, her only chance is to destroy without sign or question: wherefore she must hoist no colours, make no disclosure of her presence, no affirmation of her character, and no attempt to exchange with the battleship that "private signal " which in real war has always played so important, so salutary, so safeguarding, so necessary a part. She is to torpedo the battleship and to fly, trusting that it is an enemy she has sunk, but never sure that it is not a friend. The necessary corollary to this novel notion of warfare is the adoption of another new notion, namely, that as the torpedo-boat is to treat the battleship, so is the battleship to treat the torpedoboat; that all torpedo-boats whatever are to be held as vermin, and that the business of a battleship is to sink, without private signal, parley, or question, every single torpedo-boat or torpedo-destroyer that unexpectedly approaches her, either at sea or in harbour. The experience of real war has, however, established beyond all doubt the supreme necessity for absolute verification of the true character of any vessel unexpectedly met at sea, before proceeding to fight her; it has shown, moreover, that, even when this necessity has been fully understood and every security to meet it, including the private signal, has been duly used, the most appalling mistakes have often occurred; nevertheless, the notion is now entertained that, in the case in question, the necessity may be disregarded, and that all the securities bred of actual experience may be abandoned.'

1 The following illustration of these remarks occurred during the Spanish-American War of 1898: "The great uncertainty and "risk of mistake, which are such serious arguments against "torpedo-boat warfare, are well illustrated by an incident which