and that in a small navy, as ours, relatively, long will be, this is doubly imperative; for the smaller the navy, the greater the need for constant efficiency to act promptly, and the smaller the expense of maintenance.  In fact, where quantity—­number—­is small, quality should be all the more high.  The quality of the whole is a question of personnel even more than of material; and the quality of the personnel can be maintained only by high individual fitness in the force, undiluted by dependence upon a large, only partly efficient, reserve element.

    “One foot on sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never,”

will not man the fleet.  It can be but an imperfect palliative, and can be absorbed effectually by the main body only in small proportions.  It is in torpedo-boats for coast defence, and in commerce-destroying for deep-sea warfare, that the true sphere for naval reserves will be found; for the duties in both cases are comparatively simple, and the organization can be the same.

Every danger of a military character to which the United States is exposed can be met best outside her own territory—­at sea.  Preparedness for naval war—­preparedness against naval attack and for naval offence—­is preparedness for anything that is likely to occur.

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY OUTLOOK.

May, 1897.

Finality, the close of a life, of a relationship, of an era, even though this be a purely artificial creation of human arrangement, in all cases appeals powerfully to the imagination, and especially to that of a generation self-conscious as ours, a generation which has coined for itself the phrase fin de siecle to express its belief, however superficial and mistaken, that it knows its own exponents and its own tendencies; that, amid the din of its own progress sounding in its ears, it knows not only whence it comes but whither it goes.  The nineteenth century is about to die, only to rise again in the twentieth.  Whence did it come?  How far has it gone?  Whither is it going?

A full reply to such queries would presume an abridged universal history of the expiring century such as a magazine article, or series of articles, could not contemplate for a moment.  The scope proposed to himself by the present writer, itself almost unmanageable within the necessary limits, looks not to the internal conditions of states, to those economical and social tendencies which occupy so large a part of contemporary attention, seeming to many the sole subjects that deserve attention, and that from the most purely material and fleshly point of view.  Important as these things are, it may be affirmed at least that they are not everything; and that, great as has been the material progress of the century, the changes in international relations and relative importance, not merely in states of the European family, but among the peoples of the