without going to sea.  We had the immense advantage of counting amongst our officers some very able men.  Nelson, of course, stands so high that he holds a place entirely by himself.  The other British chiefs, good as they were, were not conspicuously superior to the Hawkes and Rodneys of an earlier day.  Howe was a great commander, but he did little more than just appear on the scene in the war.  Almost the same may be said of Hood, of whom Nelson wrote, ’He is the greatest sea-officer I ever knew.’[45] There must have been something, therefore, beyond the meritorious qualities of our principal officers which helped us so consistently to victory.  The many triumphs won could not have been due in every case to the individual superiority of the British admiral or captain to his opponent.  There must have been bad as well as good amongst the hundreds on our lists; and we cannot suppose that Providence had so arranged it that in every action in which a British officer of inferior ability commanded a still inferior French commander was opposed to him.  The explanation of our nearly unbroken success is, that the British was a thoroughly sea-going navy, and became more and more so every month; whilst the French, since the close of the American war, had lost to a great extent its sea-going character and, because we shut it up in its ports, became less and less sea-going as hostilities continued.  The war had been for us, in the words of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, ’a continuous course of victory won mainly by seamanship.’  Our navy, as regards sea-experience, especially of the officers, was immensely superior to the French.  This enabled the British Government to carry into execution sound strategic plans, in accordance with which the coasts of France and its dependent or allied countries were regarded as the English frontier to be watched or patrolled by our fleets.

[Footnote 45:  Laughton, Nelson’sLett._and_Desp._ p. 71.]

Before the long European war had been brought to a formal ending we received some rude rebuffs from another opponent of unsuspected vigour.  In the quarrel with the United States, the so-called ‘War of 1812,’ the great sea-power of the British in the end asserted its influence, and our antagonists suffered much more severely, even absolutely, than ourselves.  At the same time we might have learned, for the Americans did their best to teach us, that over-confidence in numerical strength and narrow professional self-satisfaction are nearly sure to lead to reverses in war, and not unlikely to end in grave disasters.  We had now to meet the elite of one of the finest communities of seamen ever known.  Even in 1776 the Americans had a great maritime commerce, which, as Mahan informs us, ’had come to be the wonder of the statesmen of the mother country.’  In the six-and-thirty years which had elapsed since then this commerce had further increased.  There was no finer nursery of seamen than the then states of the American Union.  Roosevelt says that ’there