We have now come to the end of the days of the naval wars of old time.  The subsequent period has been illustrated repeatedly by manifestations of sea-power, often of great interest and importance, though rarely understood or even discerned by the nations which they more particularly concerned.  The British sea-power, notwithstanding the first year of the war of 1812, had come out of the great European conflict unshaken and indeed more preeminent than ever.  The words used, half a century before by a writer in the great French ‘Encyclopedie,’ seemed more exact than when first written. ‘L’empiredes_mers_,’ he says, is, ’le plus avantageux de tous les empires; les Phoeniciens le possedoient autre fois et c’est aux Anglois que cette gloire appartient aujourd’hui sur toutes les puissances maritimes.’[47] Vast out-lying territories had been acquired or were more firmly held, and the communications of all the over-sea dominions of the British Crown were secured against all possibility of serious menace for many years to come.  Our sea-power was so ubiquitous and all-pervading that, like the atmosphere, we rarely thought of it and rarely remembered its necessity or its existence.  It was not till recently that the greater part of the nation—­for there were many, and still are some exceptions—­perceived that it was the medium apart from which the British Empire could no more live than it could have grown up.  Forty years after the fall of Napoleon we found ourselves again at war with a great power.  We had as our ally the owner of the greatest navy in the world except our own.  Our foe, as regards his naval forces, came the next in order.  Yet so overwhelming was the strength of Great Britain and France on the sea that Russia never attempted to employ her navy against them.  Not to mention other expeditions, considerable enough in themselves, military operations on the largest scale were undertaken, carried on for many months, and brought to a successful termination on a scene so remote that it was two thousand miles from the country of one, and three thousand from that of the other partner in the alliance.  ’The stream of supplies and reinforcements, which in terms of modern war is called “communications,”, was kept free from even the threat of molestation, not by visible measures, but by the undisputed efficacy of a real, though imperceptible sea-power.  At the close of the Russian war we encountered, and unhappily for us in influential positions, men who, undismayed by the consequences of mimicking in free England the cast-iron methods of the Great Frederick, began to measure British requirements by standards borrowed from abroad and altogether inapplicable to British conditions.  Because other countries wisely abstained from relying on that which they did not possess, or had only imperfectly and with elaborate art created, the mistress of the seas was led to proclaim her disbelief in the very force that had made and kept her dominion, and urged to defend herself with fortifications by advisers who, like Charles II and the Duke of York two centuries before, were ‘not ashamed of it.’  It was long before the peril into which this brought the empire was perceived; but at last, and in no small degree owing to the teachings of Mahan, the people themselves took the matter in hand and insisted that a great maritime empire should have adequate means of defending all that made its existence possible.