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 result in both the French Revolutionary war (1793 to 1801) and the Napoleonic war which began in 1803.  Taking both contests down to the end of the Trafalgar year, the following table will show how great was the development of the line-of-battle-ship class below the three-decker and above the 64-gun ship.  It will also show that there was no development of, but a relative decline in, the three-deckers and the 64’s, the small additions, where there were any, being generally due to captures from the enemy.  The two-deckers not ‘fit to lie in a line’ were at the end of the Trafalgar year about half what they were when the first period of the ‘Great War’ began.  When we come to the frigate classes we find the same result.  In the earlier war 11 frigates of 44 and 40 guns were introduced into our navy.  It is worth notice that this number was not increased, and by the end of the Trafalgar year had, on the contrary, declined to 10.  The smallest frigates, of 28 guns, were 27 in 1793, and 13 at the end of the Trafalgar year.  On the other hand, the increase in the medium frigate classes (38, 36, and 32 guns) was very large.  From 1793 to the end of the Trafalgar year the 38-gun frigates increased from 8 to 50, and the 36-gun frigates from 16 to 54.