epresent the trend of thought in a body of voters. On
subjects of less immediate moment, as military and naval matters
are--except when war looms near, and preparation is too late--men's
brains, already full enough of pressing cares, refuse to work, and
submit passively to impressions, as the eye, without conscious action,
takes note of and records external incidents. Unfortunately these
impressions, uncorrected by reflection, exaggerated in narration, and
intensified by the repetition of a number of writers, come to
constitute a body of public belief, not strictly rational in its birth
or subsequent growth, but as impassive in its resistance to argument
as it was innocent of mental process during its formation.

The intention of the present paper is to meet, and as far as possible
to remove, some such current errors of the day on naval
matters--popular misconceptions, continually encountered in
conversation and in the newspapers.

Accepting the existence of the navy, and the necessity for its
continuance--for some starting-point must be assumed--the errors to be
touched upon are:

1. That the United States needs a navy "for defence only."

2. That a navy "for defence only" means for the immediate defence of
our seaports and coast-line; an allowance also being made for
scattered cruisers to prey upon an enemy's commerce.

3. That if we go beyond this, by acquiring any territory overseas,
either by negotiation or conquest, we step at once to the need of
having a navy larger than the largest, which is that of Great Britain,
now the largest in the world.

4. That the difficulty of doing this, and the expense involved, are
the greater because of the rapid advances in naval improvement, which
it is gravely said make a ship obsolete in a very few years; or, to
use a very favorite hyperbole, she becomes obsolete before she can be
launched. The assertion of the rapid obsolescence of ships of war
will be dwelt upon, in the hopes of contravening it.

5. After this paper had been written, the calamity to the United
States ship _Maine_, in the harbor of Havana, elicited, from the
mourning and consternation of the country, the evident tokens of other
unreasoning apprehensions--springing from imperfect knowledge and
vague impressions--which at least should be noticed cursorily, and if
possible appeased.

_First_, the view that the United States should plan its navy--in
numbers and in sizes of ships--for defence only, rests