hey
shine in that way of life, which specially requires such. Without much
forethought, they have sailors innumerable, and of the best quality.
The English have among them also, strange as it may seem to the cursory
observer, a great gift of organizing; witness their Arkwrights and
others: and this gift they may often, in matters Naval more than
elsewhere, get the chance of exercising. For a Ship's Crew, or even a
Fleet, unlike a land Army, is of itself a unity, its fortunes disjoined,
dependent on its own management; and it falls, moreover, as no land army
can, to the undivided guidance of one man,--who (by hypothesis, being
English) has now and then, from of old, chanced to be an organizing man;
and who is always much interested to know and practise what has been
well organized. For you are in contact with verities, to an unexampled
degree, when you get upon the Ocean, with intent to sail on it, much
more to fight on it;--bottomless destruction raging beneath you and on
all hands of you, if you neglect, for any reason, the methods of keeping
it down, and making it float you to your aim!

"The English Navy is in tolerable order at that period. But as to the
English Army,--we may say it is, in a wrong sense, the wonder of
the world, and continues so throughout the whole of this History and
farther! Never before, among the rational sons of Adam, were Armies
sent out on such terms,--namely without a General, or with no General
understanding the least of his business. The English have a notion that
Generalship is not wanted; that War is not an Art, as playing Chess is,
as finding the Longitude, and doing the Differential Calculus are (and
a much deeper Art than any of these); that War is taught by Nature, as
eating is; that courageous soldiers, led on by a courageous Wooden Pole
with Cocked-hat on it, will do very well. In the world I have not found
opacity of platitude go deeper among any People. This is Difficulty
First, not yet suspected by an English People, capable of great opacity
on some subjects.

"Difficulty Second is, That their Ministry, whom they had to force into
this War, perhaps do not go zealously upon it. And perhaps even, in the
above circumstances, they totally want knowledge how to go upon it, were
they never so zealous; Difficulty Second might be much helped, were it
not for Difficulty First. But the administering of War is a thing
also that does not come to a man like eating.--This Second Difficulty,