mand by seniority, they become disqualified by long retirement from active service. "Au reste, to you belongs the prestige of past success, to us the teaching of adversity. We have learned in the least pleasing, but we trust the most instructive, school. You may smile at our confidence, because it is new-born : yet it is for that reason less likely to deceive us. "We build upon what is, not on what was, and we are safe from the danger, which has proved fatal to many nations a reliance upon successes achieved in a state of things which has passed away. Spain still retains the pillars of Hercules on her coin, but upon Gibraltar your flag has long been waving." Such we might suppose to be the speculations of a French naval officer, on the future of his own profession; and without subscribing to their truth, we must allow they have some foundation in facts. Let it be remembered that defeats (and of a very mortifying and discreditable character) may be, and have been, inflicted by the weaker party. Had any one, previous to the last American war, told us that an upstart power possessed of half-a-dozen frigates and twice as many sloops, should have turned the balance of success against us, we should have laughed them to scorn. Yet the three years of American war cost us not comparatively only, but absolutely, more defeats in single actions than twenty years of war with France. All the frigates of France, and the number captured alone was 137, did not take from us more prizes of the same class in single actions, than the one American frigate "Constitution."* Such recollections should make us cautious of holding our adversaries in contempt, and few nations are more prone to do so than ourselves. I shall not stop here to express any opinion upon this last of the three grounds which, as before said, Frenchmen rely on. * In accounting for the defeats of the American war Englishmen are accustomed to attribute them wholly to the superior size and force of the enemy's ships. It is perfectly true that this superiority was sufficient to account for the unfavourable result, nay, to make such result inevitable; yet candour compels us to admit that the immediate and actual cause of our defeat, in several instances, was the superior gunnery of the Americans. That our ships should have been captured by opponents half as large again, is no proof of extraordinary prowess in the victors, but that half the ships taken should be reduced to a sinking state, and actually founder, is irresistible evidence of good gunnery. 109 CHAP. VII. THE NATURE OF OUR OWN CONFIDENCE IN THE NAVY EXAMINED. HAVING said so much on the nature of that confidence in their navy, which indisputably possesses our neighbours, it is time to consider the equally strong but opposite reliance, that Englishmen repose in the invincibility of their "wooden walls." That our confidence is implicit and unlimited, is sufficiently proved by the important, or rather vital, interests which we stake upon it. Is our reliance as well founded as it is sincere ? The belief of Englishmen in this superiority of their own navy and seamen, is not only the natural but the unavoidable result of past experience, and though the courage of our seamen should ever decline, or the skill of our officers depart, we should still retain our traditional faith, until compelled by adversity to abandon it. But in the minds of landsmen, at least, there must be often very indistinct ideas as to what this superiority consists in, and indeed as to the sense in which they use the word "NAVY." If by our navy they mean the aggregate of those formidable structures which, for the most part, " slumber in their shadows" on the Medway, the Tamar or Porchester and Fareham lakes, the superiority of that navy is undeniable. If, again, they use the word in a larger sense, and mean not only the ships and men of the royal navy, but those vast unorganised resources, those thousands of merchant seamen, who might in time be made available, equally undeniable is our potential superiority. But it cannot be in either sense that the word "navy" can be understood, whether by gentlemen in after-dinner speeches, when they respond to the toast, "our glorious navy;" by old ladies, when they retire to bed, thankful for "the navy,' which saves them from the danger of a razzia; by blockheads, when they petition against the enrolment of the militia; or wise statesmen, when they defer commencing harbours of refuge until war breaks out. It is clear that all these classes imagine the "navy" to be a present and available force, a ready shield of defence, or, if need be, a sword prompt to avenge. Now the portion of our navy answering this discription is the force "in commission," and this varies, as is said, with the exigency of foreign policy, and perhaps of economy. Some times we have no available force at all, either at home or in Europe, and should an exigency arise, we should have to commission ships and wait for months before they were manned, When they were manned, those newly-commissioned ships would be very indifferent representatives of our "glorious navy," and for some time, whether superior to foreigners or not, would be immea. surably inferior to English ships longer in commission. An old "Queen's pilot," whose experience and opportunities of judging must have been very great, remarked to the writer once the vast difference in the efficiency of ships going out of port the first time, and the same ships returning from foreign service, adding that the former were at times "as helpless as young soldiers:" the efficiency here meant was in the discharge of those nautical duties which might be expected from merchant sailors. Of course in respect of military duties the difference would be far greater; a newly-commissioned ship, if manned by merchant sailors, would not be a "man-of-war" for some months at least. Now when we consider that our force in commission forms but a small fraction of that which we should require in war, and that of the remainder we know no more than of the qualifications of the 101st regiment, whenever it shall be |