Page:The empire and the century.djvu/236

 the negotiations where Nelson added Copenhagen to the laurels he had won at St Vincent and the Nile. In the recent war, it is clear that diplomacy and preparedness, which were closely coordinated by the Japanese, had no intimate relation whatever in Russian polity. In the case of Japan at the outbreak of war, we find that the shipbuilding programme was completely finished and the fleet concentrated at sea, whereas in Russia nine battleships were still building, and the commissioned ships badly divided in various harbours. The Japanese triumphantly vindicated Nelson's saying by showing to the world the close connection between the soft words of diplomacy and the hard knocks of gunnery. It is equally true that Admiral Togo, who paid us the compliment of hoisting his flag on Trafalgar Day, bore out in practice the truth of the Great Order which thoughts of that day induced us to refer to at the beginning of this article.

If the Great Order had inspired our policy during the past fifty years, it is difficult to believe that so large a proportion of expenditure and men would have been tied up in what Sir George Clarke has christened sedentary defence, involving as it has done dispersion of effort away from mobility, which latter is the essence of a field army and of a navy. For the work of an Empire of over 12,000 square miles, with 43,000 miles of coastline and a vast trade, mobile forces are most essential, for they only can cope with the whole of its multitudinous requirements. Yet, systematically, up to the time of the formation of the Defence Committee the war problems were faced piecemeal. There was no finality to the demands which could thus be formulated on purely imaginary hypotheses. In the words of the Esher Committee, 'It would be easy to show that unnecessary weakness, coupled with inordinate waste of national resources, thus results.' It is also beyond dispute that after the Peninsular, Crimean, American Civil, and Franco-German Wars we lived under the spell of military operations which had no parallel to