the third with the Trafalgar campaign and the commercial struggle
to which the naval side of the war was later confined. The career
of Nelson is given an emphasis justified by his primacy among naval
leaders and the value of his example for later times.

The effect of land events in obscuring the naval side of the war,
already mentioned, is explained not merely by their magnitude, but
by the fact that, though Great Britain was more than once brought
to the verge of ruin, this was a consequence not of the enemy's power
on the sea, but of his victories on land. Furthermore, the slow
process which ended in the downfall of Napoleon and the reduction of
France to her old frontiers was accomplished, not so conspicuously
by the economic pressure of sea power, as by the efforts of armies
on battlefields from Russia to Spain. On the sea British supremacy
was more firmly established, and the capacities of France and her
allies were far less, than in preceding conflicts of the century.

_The French Navy Demoralized_

The explanation of this weakness of the French navy involves an
interesting but somewhat perplexing study of the influences which
make for naval growth or decay. That its ineffectiveness was due
largely to an inferior national instinct or genius for sea warfare,
as compared with England, is discredited by the fact that the disparity
was less obvious in previous wars; for, as Lord Clowes has insisted,
England won no decisive naval victory against superior forces from
the second Dutch War to the time of Nelson. The familiar theory
that democracy ruined the French navy will be accepted nowadays
only with some qualifications, especially when it is remembered
that French troops equally affected by the downfall of caste rule
were steadily defeating the armies of monarchical powers. It is
true, however, that navies, as compared with armies, are more
complicated and more easily disorganized machines, and that it
would have taxed even Napoleonic genius to reorganize the French
navy after the neglect, mutiny, and wholesale sweeping out of trained
personnel to which it was subjected in the first furies of revolution.
Whatever the merits of the officers of the old regime, selected as
they were wholly from the aristocracy and dominated by the defensive
policy of the French service, three-fourths of them were driven out
by 1791, and replaced by officers from the merchant service, from
subordinate ratings, and from the crews. Su