Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/93

Rh What again does history teach save the victory of the fittest to win? Antony's mastodons and the Venetian mastodons at Lepanto were relatively the same thing,—they embodied the same reliance upon the practically invulnerable.

If we examine Actium, we find Antony's big ships proving as invulnerable as ever the Venetian galleons at Lepanto. They ceased to be invulnerable only when the ships of Octavianus began to ram so as to disable the steering gear and then brought fire to their aid—that is to say just so soon as the superior fitness to win of the crews enabled them to devise a means of overcoming the barriers between them and success.

Speculatively, we may apply this reasoning to the Russo-Japanese War and the destruction of the Baltic Fleet. Suppose the rival sides to have changed ships, and Togo and his men to have been caught on board the Russian ships in the formation in which Rogestvensky was caught. Can anyone doubt that the Russian squadron manned by Japanese would not easily have extricated itself, and easily annihilated the enemy in detail? Yet, since things were the other way about the tactics of Togo will go down to history as the excellent thing to be studied and imitated, and the tactics of Rogestvensky as the hall-mark of the maximum of badness.

Again: suppose Nelson and his men to have changed ships with the Allies at Trafalgar. Is there any reasonable doubt that British ships would have been aught