of the day.  Even in those homes of political virtue where the administrative machinery was worked by or in the interest of speculating capitalists and privileged companies, the accumulating evidence of late years has proved that everything was not considered to be, and as a matter of fact was not, exactly as it ought to have been.  Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, have been held up to obloquy because they thought that the coast of England could be defended against a naval enemy better by fortifications than by a good fleet and, as Pepys noted, were ‘not ashamed of it.’  The truth is that neither the king nor the duke believed in the power of a navy to ward off attack from an island.  This may have been due to want of intellectual capacity; but it would be going a long way to put it down to personal wickedness.  They have had many imitators, some in our own day.  The huge forts which stud the coast of the United Kingdom, and have been erected within the memory of the present generation, are monuments, likely to last for many years, of the inability of people, whom no one could accuse of being vicious, to rate sea-power at its proper value.  It is much more likely that it was owing to a reluctance to study questions of naval defence as industriously as they deserved, and to that moral timidity which so often tempts even men of proved physical courage to undertake the impossible task of making themselves absolutely safe against hostile efforts at every point.

Charles II has also been charged with indifference to the interests of his country, or worse, because during a great naval war he adopted the plan of trying to weaken the enemy by destroying his commerce.  The king ’took a fatal resolution of laying up his great ships and keeping only a few frigates on the cruise.’  It is expressly related that this was not Charles’s own idea, but that it was urged upon him by advisers whose opinion probably seemed at the time as well worth listening to as that of others.  Anyhow, if the king erred, as he undoubtedly did, he erred in good company.  Fourteen hundred years earlier the statesmen who conducted the great war against Carthage, and whose astuteness has been the theme of innumerable panegyrics since, took the same ‘fatal resolution.’  In the midst of the great struggle they ’did away with the fleet.  At the most they encouraged privateering; and with that view placed the war-vessels of the State at the disposal of captains who were ready to undertake a corsair warfare on their own account.’[41] In much later times this method has had many and respectable defenders.  Mahan’s works are, in a sense, a formal warning to his fellow-citizens not to adopt it.  In France, within the last years of the nineteenth century, it found, and appears still to find, adherents enough to form a school.  The reappearance of belief in demonstrated impossibilities is a recognised incident in human history; but it is usually confined to the emotional or the vulgar.  It is serious