Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/161

Rh of the old days. This may partly be attributed to the existence of 'seamen.' When the ironclad idea first entered, the seaman appeared likely to be superseded by the 'soldier at sea'—the integral idea of the earliest ages. Fleets and sailors represented an immense amount of sunk capital,—so much 'stock' as it were.

The true inwardness of this may perhaps be made clearer by a reference to an incident of every-day life. A publisher, let us say, prints 2,000 copies of a book upon some subject that quickly grows out of date. Having sold 1,000 of his first edition, he finds that the book is out-of-date, new facts having come into existence since the work was published. To reprint an up-to-date book means practically a new book, and it certainly entails the sacrifice as waste paper of half the first edition. Business instinct forces the publisher, first to postpone any new edition as long as possible, so as to sacrifice as little as may be of his stock, secondly all his efforts are directed to utilizing the stock to bring it to date by adding addenda pages to the original book.

This is exactly what happened with the navies of the world: all nations that had large fleets of unarmoured ships avoided the ironclad as long as they dared, and, forced to adopt it, sought to do so as cheaply as possible. It was grafted on to the old navies and evolved to suit the old navies. Thus masts and yards—bound up with the existence of