benefit of him who cannot read while running, and who must halt and laboriously spell out the records of which he would know something, there are brief and popular general histories, not all free, perhaps, from inaccuracies of details, yet, for the most part, full and fair enough to impart a tolerably just impression of the share borne by these kings, statesmen, reformers and soldiers in the creation of the splendid social fabric in which we live.
It is not here suggested that British readers take anything like full advantage of the vast stores of knowledge which have thus been laid open to them. Indeed, the study of history is sadly neglected among us. Speaking as Professor of History at King's College, London, Mr. J. K. Laughton has said, "I am unhappily too well acquainted with the surpassing ignorance of the average young man."[1] And other professors of history, with whom I have communicated, fully bear out the lament of Professor Laughton. The general ignorance of the facts of modern British history is particularly insisted upon by all.
Yet, even if British students were in the habit of thoroughly digesting the ordinary British histories which are within their reach, they would still know little about the nature and services of the British Navy. Our greater historians deal very sparingly with those subjects. Many of them seem to have been deterred by an exaggerated estimate of the attendant difficulties, or by an impression that naval history is far too technical to be understood by lay people. Others have altogether failed to awaken to the importance of the matter, and have, by that very failure, convicted themselves of incompetence. As for the popular historians, the compilers of school histories, text-books, and such-like, they have for the most part, and indeed almost without exception, bungled, where they have not shamefully scamped, the facts of our naval story.
This neglect is doubly strange. The modern British historians of ancient Greece and Rome have not to the same extent avoided or misrepresented the naval side of their subject. Many of us can, I am sure, echo much of Dr. Miller Maguire's complaint that in early life "he was actually obliged to learn off by heart all the little nautical incidents of the Peloponnesian War, and to study the tactics and carrying power of the vessels of the Carthaginians and the Romans, while no one ever dreamt of telling him anything
- ↑ ' The Study of Naval History '; paper read at the R. U. S. I., March 11th, 1896
