Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/72

56 Water School' principles. She had but a comparatively small army of moderate efficiency available for military operations: and even of this she made no great use. She was content to leave things to her navy and trust to the 'silent pressure of Sea Power.' That silent pressure might have stood her in fairly good stead perhaps, had Eome not turned her attention to 'other ways.'

The Syracusan ships and the Roman ships with corvi show, as later, Greek fire, cannon, steam, shells and armour, were to show, how unstable a thing is Sea Power even at its best. On land, once in a way, as with the phalanx, with elephants, possibly (but not certainly) with cannon, new inventions—' other ways ' — have neutralised skill, courage, and practice: but the sea is full of incidents whereby high efficiency has been made a mere cipher through the raw man having some new invention, some new idea, placed in his hands. Given the necessary fitness, Fate seems ever to have supplied the necessary weapon. Yet Sea Power as a definite factor is assessed as though such incidents had never been, and ' Fitness to win ' is never included as one of its factors.

Confident in the corvi, the Romans,—without sea practice be it noted, for they even learned to row in 'shore establishments,'—sallied out and easily defeated the foremost seamen of the age. Is not a true appreciation of this worth a dozen realisations that 'it was the ships of Nelson at Trafalgar which won the battle of Waterloo'?