hose of earlier date, or belonging to
a rival navy. I know the issues that such statements are likely
to raise; and I ask you, as naval architects, to bear with me
patiently when I say what I am going to say. It is this: If you
devise for the ship so produced the tactical system for which
she is specially adapted you must, in order to be logical, base
your system on her power of defeating her particular antagonist.
Consequently, you must abandon the principle of concentration of
superior numbers against your enemy; and, what is more, must be
prepared to maintain that such concentration on his part against
yourself would be ineffectual. This will compel a reversion to
tactical methods which made a fleet action a series of duels
between pairs of combatants, and--a thing to be pondered on
seriously--never enabled anyone to win a decisive victory on the
sea. The position will not be made more logical if you demand both
superior size and also superior numbers, because if you adopt
the tactical system appropriate to one of the things demanded,
you will rule out the other. You cannot employ at the same time
two different and opposed tactical systems.

It is not necessary to the line of argument above indicated to
ignore the merits of the battleship class. Like their predecessors,
the ships of the line, it is really battleships which in a naval
war dominate the situation. We saw that it was so at the time
of Trafalgar, and we see that it has been so in the war between
Russia and Japan, at all events throughout the 1904 campaign.
The experience of naval war, down to the close of that in which
Trafalgar was the most impressive event, led to the virtual
abandonment of ships of the line[92] above and below a certain
class. The 64-gun ships and smaller two-deckers had greatly
diminished in number, and repetitions of them grew more and more
rare. It was the same with the three-deckers, which, as the late
Admiral Colomb pointed out, continued to be built, though in
reduced numbers, not so much for their tactical efficiency as
for the convenient manner in which they met the demands for the
accommodation required in flag-ships. The tactical condition
which the naval architects of the Trafalgar period had to meet
was the employment of an increased number of two-deckers of the
medium classes.

[Footnote 92: Experience of war, as regards increase in the number
of medium-sized men-of-war of the different classes, tended to the
same res