From this last evil the United States Navy in Jefferson’s day was saved by the simple fact that the officers were young men, or at the most in the early prime of life,—­the Navy itself, in 1812, being less than twenty years old as a corporate organization.  The British Navy of 1739 was in very different case.  For a quarter of a century the only important military occurrence had been the Battle of Cape Passaro, in 1718, where the British fleet in a running fight destroyed a much inferior Spanish force; and the occasion then was not one of existent war, but of casual hostilities, which, precipitated by political conditions, began and ended with the particular incident, as far as the sea was concerned.  Back of this lay only Malaga, in 1704; for the remaining years of war, up to 1713, had been unmarked by fleet battles.  The tendency of this want of experience, followed by the long period—­not of peace only, but—­of professional depression resultant upon inactivity and national neglect, was to stagnation, to obviate which no provision existed or was attempted.  Self-improvement was not a note of the service, nor of the times.  The stimulus of occupation and the corrective of experience being removed, average men stuck where they were, and grew old in a routine of service, or, what was perhaps worse, out of the service in all but name.  In naval warfare, the Battle of Malaga, the last point of performance, remained the example, and the Fighting Instructions the passively accepted authority.  The men at the head of the Navy, to whom the country naturally looked, either had no record—­no proof of fitness—­because but youths in the last war, or else, in simple consequence of having then had a chance to show themselves, were now superannuated.  This very fact, however, had the singular and unfortunate result that, because the officers of reputation were old, men argued, by a curious perversion of thought, that none but the old should be trusted.

Of this two significant cases will tell more than many words.  Mathews, who commanded at Toulon in 1744, was then sixty-seven years old, and had not been at sea between 1724 and 1742.  Hawke, in 1747, when he had already established an excellent reputation as a captain, and for enterprise in recent battle, was thought young to be entrusted with a squadron of a dozen ships-of-the-line, although he was forty-two,—­two years older than Nelson at the Nile, but four years younger than Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo, and one year less in age than Grant at the close of the American Civil War.  Such instances are not of merely curious interest; they are symptoms of professional states of mind, of a perplexity and perversion of standards which work disastrously whenever war succeeds to a prolonged period of peace, until experience has done its work by sorting out the unsound from among the fair-seeming, and has shown also that men may be too old as well as too young for unaccustomed responsibility.  The later prevalence of juster views was exemplified in the choice of Wolfe, who was but thirty-two when he fell before Quebec in 1759, charged with one of the most difficult enterprises that had then been entrusted to a British general.