it was the more dangerous because in itself an admirable and necessary instrument, constructed on principles essentially accurate.  A standard wholly false may have its error demonstrated with comparative ease; but no servitude is more hopeless than that of unintelligent submission to an idea formally correct, yet incomplete.  It has all the vicious misleading of a half-truth unqualified by appreciation of modifying conditions; and so seamen who disdained theories, and hugged the belief in themselves as “practical,” became doctrinaires in the worst sense.

It would seem, however, that a necessary antecedent to deliverance from a false conception,—­as from any injurious condition,—­is a practical illustration of its fallacy.  Working consequences must receive demonstration, concrete in some striking disastrous event, before improvement is undertaken.  Such experience is painful to undergo; but with most men, even in their private capacity, and in nearly all governmental action where mere public interests are at stake, remedy is rarely sought until suffering is not only felt, but signalized in a conspicuous incident.  It is needless to say that the military professions in peace times are peculiarly liable to this apathy; like some sleepers, they can be awakened only by shaking.  For them, war alone can subject accepted ideas to the extreme test of practice.  It is doubtless perfectly true that acquaintance with military and naval history, mastery of their teachings, will go far to anticipate the penalty attaching to truth’s last argument—­chastisement; but imagination is fondly impatient of warning by the past, and easily avails itself of fancied or superficial differences in contemporary conditions, to justify measures which ignore, or even directly contravene, ascertained and fundamental principles of universal application.

Even immediate practical experience is misinterpreted when incidents are thus viewed through the medium of a precedent bias.  The Transvaal War, for instance, has afforded some striking lessons of needed modifications, consequent upon particular local factors, or upon developments in the material of war; but does any thoughtful military man doubt that imagination has been actively at work, exaggerating or distorting, hastily waiving aside permanent truth in favor of temporary prepossessions or accidental circumstance?  It is at least equally likely that the naval world at the present time is hugging some fond delusions in the excessive size and speed to which battle-ships are tending, and in the disproportionate weight assigned to the defensive as compared to the offensive factors in a given aggregate tonnage.  Imagination, theory, a priori reasoning, is here at variance with rational historical precedent, which has established the necessity of numbers as well as of individual power in battle-ships, and demonstrated the superiority of offensive over defensive strength in military systems.  These—­and