control the sea, the amount of its wealth
dispersed in merchantmen is just so much loss in time of war.

The major element in sea power is the fleet, but possession of
the largest navy is no guarantee of victory or even of control
of the sea. Size is important, but it is an interesting fact that
most of the great victories in naval history have been won by a
smaller fleet over a larger. The effectiveness of a great navy
depends first on its quality, secondly, on how it is handled, and
thirdly, on its power of reaching the enemy's communications.

The quality of a navy is two-fold, material and personal. In material,
the great problem of modern days is to keep abreast of the time. The
danger to a navy lies in conservatism and bureaucratic control. There
is always the chance that a weaker power may defeat the stronger, not
by using the old weapons, but by devising some new weapon that will
render the old ones obsolete. The trouble with the professional man
in any walk of life has always been that he sticks to the traditional
ways. In consequence he lays himself open to the amateur, who,
caring nothing about tradition, beats him with something novel.
The inventions that have revolutionized naval warfare have come
from men outside the naval profession. Thus the Romans, unable to
match the Carthaginians in seamanship, made that seamanship of no
value by their invention of the corvus. Greek fire not only saved
the insignificant fleets of the Eastern Empire, but annihilated the
huge armadas of Saracen and Slav. If the South in our Civil War
had possessed the necessary resources, her ironclad rams would
have made an end of the Union navy and of the war. In our own time
the German submarine came within an ace of winning the war despite
all the Allied dreadnoughts, because its potentialities had not
been realized and no counter measures devised. A navy that drops
behind is lost.

The personal side is a matter of training and morale. The material
part is of no value unless it is operated by skill and by the will
to win. Slackness or inexperience or lack of heart in officers
or men--any of these may bring ruin. Napoleon once spoke of the
Russian army as brave, but as "an army without a soul." A navy
must have a soul. Unfortunately, the tendency in recent years has
been to emphasize the material and the mechanical at the expense of
the intellectual and spiritual. With all the enormous development
of the ships and weapons, it mu