hose
ideal is a number, more or less small, of cruisers neither fitted nor
intended for combined action. Under these circumstances, the details of
the internal economy of the single ship usurp in the professional mind
an undue proportion of the attention which, in a rightly constituted
navy, might far better be applied to the study of naval tactics, in the
higher sense of that word, and of naval campaigns. Farragut could not
but feel the influence of this tendency, so strongly marked in the
service to which he belonged; the more so, as it is a thoroughly good
tendency when not pushed to an exclusive extent. But here the habit of
study, and stretching in every direction his interest in matters
professional, stood him in good stead, and prepared him unconsciously
for destinies that could not have been foreseen. The custom of reading
had made him familiar with the biography and history of his profession,
the school to which the great Napoleon recommended all who would fit
themselves for high military command; and of which a recent
distinguished authority has said that it may be questioned whether a
formulated art of war can be said to exist, except as the embodiment of
the practice of great captains illustrated in their campaigns.

From these, with his great natural aptitudes for war, Farragut quickly
assimilated its leading principles, which he afterward so signally
illustrated in act and embodied in maxims of his own that have already
been quoted. He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though
possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion;
but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his
own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was. "If once you get in
a soldier's rear, he is gone," was probably in part a bit of
good-natured chaff at the sister profession; but it sums up in a few
words the significance and strategic importance of his course in passing
the batteries of the river forts, of Port Hudson and of Mobile, and
brings those brilliant actions into strict conformity with the soundest
principles of war. The phrases, whose frequent repetition shows how deep
a hold they had taken upon him--"The more you hurt the enemy the less he
will hurt you"--"The _best_ protection against the enemy's fire is a
well-directed fire from our own guns"--sum up one of the profoundest of
all military truths, easily confessed but with difficulty lived up to,
and which in thes