which scarcely any opening
had been offered before the unexpected calamity of the great civil
strife burst upon the country. In estimating his military character and
rightly apportioning the credit due to his great achievements, much
stress must be laid upon the constant effort for professional
improvement made by him from his early life. "Without the opportunity
and the environment which enabled him to develop himself," writes one
who knew him for over forty years, "Farragut might have gone to his rest
comparatively unknown; yet among his comrades and contemporaries in the
navy he would have been recognized as no ordinary man, no merely routine
naval officer, who kept his watch and passed through life as easily as
he could." "He told me," writes another, who first met him after his
flag was flying, "that there are comparatively few men from whom one
could not learn something, and that a naval officer should always be
adding to his knowledge; it might enable him to be more useful some day;
that it was hard to say what a naval officer might not have to do." Even
after the war, when his reputation was at its height, in visiting
European ports he never for a moment lost sight of this duty of
professional acquirement. Not a harbor was visited that he did not
observe critically its chances for defense by sea or land. "Who knows,"
said he, "but that my services may be needed here some day?" "Ah, Mr.
Tucker," said Earl St. Vincent to his secretary when planning an attack
upon Brest, "had Captain Jervis[Z] surveyed Brest when he visited it in
1774, in 1800 Lord St. Vincent would not have been in want of his
information."

[Footnote Z: Captain Jervis and Earl St. Vincent were the same
officer under different appellations.]

It was not merely in the acquisition of knowledge, commonly so called,
that this practice contributed to prepare Farragut for his great mission
as a naval commander-in-chief, but also in the discipline of character
and in the development of natural capacities admirably suited for that
position. It should not be overlooked that before the war, and now again
in our own day, the idea of professional improvement in the United
States Navy has fastened for its fitting subject upon the development of
the material of war, to the comparative exclusion of the study of naval
warfare. This naturally results from the national policy, which does not
propose to put afloat a fleet in the proper sense of the word; and w