If, indeed, this new notion should be acted upon, mistakes more appalling than any that have hitherto occurred will be inevitable. It is to be expected, however, that the new notion will be so modified as to become identical with the old conviction, that verification is absolutely necessary before fighting; in which case the private signal will recover all its uses and all its importance, and it will be recognized that the torpedo-boat can no more safely or prudently be used than any other vessel of war to sink a ship, unless and until it has absolutely ascertained to a certainty the enemy character of that ship, either by use of the private signal, by undoubted surrounding circumstances, or by the fact that the ship is actually lying in an enemy's port as part of that enemy's forces for the fact alone of her being in such a port would not of itself suffice, since she might be a neutral man-of-war. When the notion is brought back to this it will be reasonable enough. But it will then have lost all that is novel in it, and the torpedoboat will then also have lost many, if not most of the uses expected from it, and many if not most of the exaggerated terrors that surround it.

66

66

66

66

"Lieutenant Fremont of the Porter' records. About 2 a.m. one morning a steamer was reported running the blockade into Havana. The 'Porter' gave chase, closed her fast, got within easy torpedo distance, and then made the night signal. It was not answered. A second time it was repeated and a gun "fired, followed by a second. The stranger replied with the "wrong signal. The 'Porter' went full speed-the stranger "opened fire, and only in the very nick of time was the supposed "blockade-runner made out to be an American ship. Torpedo"boats, it should be said, were always fired upon first and "inquiries were only made subsequently. Nothing could have "saved the big ship in this instance, and the torpedo-boat "could not have been much injured."-The Downfall of Spain, by H. W. Wilson, London, 1900, p. 438.

C

Again, the belief in the advantage of missile weapons over all others, which originated in actual fighting experience, which began with the successful pitting of the English bowman with his cloth-yard shaft against sword, lance, and body armour combined in their greatest perfection, and which has lasted from Sluys to Trafalgar, has in recent times been rudely assailed, and precisely there where it might have been expected to be most unassailable— in the case of the ship and the great gun. Admiral Sir Gerard Noel, a distinguished naval officer, who from 1893 up to 1898 was a sea lord of the Admiralty, recorded his own convictions in 1874 in an essay which, from among many others, was selected for the prize by such other distinguished officers as Admirals Milne, Ryder, and Cooper Key; and they are as follows:

66

"In a general action I do not hold that the guns will be the "principal weapon; but should the ship's engines or steering"gear be disabled, temporarily or permanently, her guns will "become all-important. Then let her show the enemy what gunners can do. . . . I am not myself of opinion that artillery "is the most important weapon in a fleet. It is, I believe, very generally held by those officers who have studied the arma"ment and manoeuvring of fleets that the ram is fast supplanting the gun in importance."

66

46

So too Captain (subsequently Admiral) Colomb in his Lessons from Lissa says:

"The serious part of a future naval attack does not appear to "be the guns but the rams."

And so also Captain Pellew in his lecture on Fleet Manœuvring says:

1

The Gun, Ram, and Torpedo, Prize Essay by Commander Gerard H. U. Noel, R.N. J. Griffin and Co., 1874.

64

Rams are the arm of naval warfare to which I attach the "chief importance. In my opinion the aim of all manoeuvring "and preliminary practice with the guns should be to get a fair opportunity for ramming."

66

The fact that British battleships are still fitted with rams suggests that disbelief in the superior importance of the missile weapon still obtains among naval officers, and still prevails among the naval lords of the Admiralty. Yet nothing is more certain than that all history and all the experience of actual naval warfare show the great gun to be, of all others, the weapon of the ship, and, of all others, that by which all naval battles have been decided. It seems, therefore, not impossible that actual naval warfare may have, as one of its first effects, to restore the belief, which actual warfare first created, in the supreme importance of the gun, and not merely to establish its superiority over either the ram or the torpedo, but to relegate both ram and torpedo to the limbo of scrap-iron.

CHAPTER III.

THE FINAL OBJECT OF WAR.

WHILE an infinity of speculations have been indulged as to the actual probable methods of modern naval warfare, and an infinity of theories thereon have been successively adopted-some to be abandoned almost as soon as adopted, others to be embodied in new vessels, new weapons, and new harbour worksyet little attention seems to have been paid or thought given by the propounders of these speculations and theories to the fact that all these operations are but means to an end. The final object and end of all warfare is to reduce the enemy to submission; and unless the operations of naval warfare can be made so to act upon the enemy as to diminish his material resources for the continuance of the war, so to injure him as to produce weakness and weariness, and so to increase that weakness and weariness as to bring him nearer to submission-unless this effect be caused, the operations themselves, however brilliant or glorious, must be held to have failed in their object. To kill, burn, destroy, capture, and proclaim victory is but to have caused the submission of the enemy's naval forces immediately effected, and unless it has so considerable an effect on the enemy's Government as to bring the latter appreciably nearer to submission, is less a proper occasion for joy and triumph than for sadness and shame.

It is to be remembered that it is not with the defeated commanders, but with the enemy's Government, that the decision rests, and that the loss of a ship, of a fleet, or even of a whole navy may conceivably leave that Government so uninjured in its material resources, so unimpaired in its power to levy men and money, as to be of no present effect in inducing it to seek peace. This was so with Trafalgar, which, although the most complete naval victory of modern times, so little availed to bring Napoleon to submission that it was immediately followed only six weeks later by his victory of Austerlitz, which in Pitt's words "rolled up the map "of Europe," was succeeded by his victory of Friedland in June, 1807, and his alliance with the Russian Emperor at Tilsit, and was followed not by peace, but by precisely eight years of incessant war, ending only in Napoleon's defeat at Leipsig in 1813. That which did affect the final end and object of the war was the incessant sap of the enemy's trade which followed Trafalgar; the denial and almost complete prevention of all international intercourse by sea, brought about by the unobtrusive yet constant action of British cruisers and privateers; the consequent enormous raising of prices on the enemy's subjects, and the resulting distress and diminution of their taxable capacity. That it was which in 1807 was felt so much by Russia that she rather chose to break with Napoleon than continue its endurance, that it was which really brought about Napoleon's disastrous Moscow campaign and the sixth coalition, which ruined him. In short, where Trafalgar had failed, capture of property and stoppage of trade succeeded, for while the former brought great glory yet had little effect, the latter had great effect though it