is the natural characteristic of a defence essentially passive; that is, of a defence which proposes to await the approach of the enemy to its own frontier, be that land or water.  Yet it scarcely could have failed soon to occur to men of Nelson’s and St. Vincent’s martial capacities, that a different disposition, which would clearly enable them to unite and intercept either one of the enemy’s divisions, must wreck the entire project; for the other twenty thousand men alone could not do serious or lasting injury.  The mere taking a position favorable to such concentration would be an adequate check.  The trouble for them undoubtedly was that which overloads, and so nullifies, all schemes for coast defence resting upon popular outcry, which demands outward and visible protection for every point, and assurance that people at war shall be guarded, not only against broken bones, but against even scratches of the skin.

This uneducated and weak idea, that protection is only adequate when co-extensive with the frontier line threatened, finds its natural outcome in a system of defence by very small vessels, in great numbers, capable of minute subdivision and wide dispersal, to which an equal tonnage locked up in larger ships cannot be subjected.  Although St. Vincent was at the head of the Admiralty which in 1801 ordered that Nelson should first organize such a flotilla, and only after that proceed to offensive measures, the results of his experience now were to form—­or at the least to confirm in him—­the conclusion which he enunciated, and to which he persistently held, during the later truly formidable preparations of Napoleon.  “Our great reliance is on the vigilance and activity of our cruisers at sea, any reduction in the number of which, by applying them to guard our ports, inlets, and beaches, would in my judgment tend to our destruction.”  Very strangely, so far as the author’s opinion goes, Nelson afterwards expressed an apparently contrary view, and sustained Mr. Pitt in his attack upon St. Vincent’s administration on this very point; an attack, in its tendency and in the moment chosen, among the most dangerous to his country ever attempted by a great and sagacious statesman.  Nelson, however, writing in May, 1804, says:  “I had wrote a memoir, many months ago, upon the propriety of a flotilla.  I had that command at the end of the last war, and I know the necessity of it, even had you, and which you ought to have, thirty or forty sail of the line in the Downs and North Sea, besides frigates &c.; but having failed so entirely in submitting my mind upon three points I was disheartened.”  This Memoir has not been preserved, but it will be noticed that, in expressing his difference from St. Vincent in the words quoted, he assumes, what did not at any time exist, thirty or forty sail-of-the-line for the North Sea and the Downs.  St. Vincent’s stand was taken on the position that the flotilla could not be manned without diminishing the cruisers in