must be attacked. If a stronger power wars with a weaker, and the weaker battle-fleets remain in harbour declining combat on the sea, the stronger battle-fleets have but a limited utility and will come to represent sunk capital that cannot be realised save in bad weather, when monitors and the like would have to make harbour.
It is of the nature of a digression, but one may well pause here to inquire whether the battleship is really logical, or really needed save to oppose other battleships. The 'ironclad' was born in the American civil war. The combatants there were ill-matched, the South had not the building resources of the North. Had things been otherwise, had the combatants had equal resources in the construction of monitors, it is at least permissible to speculate as to whether the battle-fleets of to-day would ever have grown into existence. The Thunderer, the Kearsage, and the Trisvititelia would perhaps seem the line along which ship-building would have proceeded, and naval warfare, realising the spirit as well as the substance of modern times, would have become solely a matter of attack on bases. As things are we would seem to have taken the substance without the spirit. Nothing is so conservative as the sea service, and as already noted, directly almost that the ironclad was formulated, efforts were made to harmonise it with old conditions. The most modern ironclad is merely the three-decker redivivus, controlled and directed chiefly by the spirit
