(_Naval_Annual_, 1908.)]
At the close of the Great War, which ended in the downfall of
Napoleon, the maritime position of the British Empire was not
only predominant--it also was, and long remained, beyond the
reach of challenge. After the stupendous events of the great
contest such successes as those at Algiers where we were helped
by the Dutch, at Navarino where we had two allies, and at Acre
were regarded as matters of course, and no very grave issue hung
upon any one of them. For more than half a century after Nelson's
death all the most brilliant achievements of British arms were
performed on shore, in India or in the Crimea. There were also many
small wars on land, and it may well have seemed to contemporaries
that the days of great naval contests were over and that force
of circumstances was converting us into a military from a naval
nation. The belief in the efficacy of naval defence was not extinct,
but it had ceased to operate actively. Even whilst the necessity
of that form of defence was far more urgent, inattention to or
ignorance of its true principles had occasionally allowed it to
grow weak, but the possibility of substituting something else for
it had not been pressed or even suggested. To this, however, we
had now come; and it was largely a consequence of the Crimean war.
In that war the British Army had nobly sustained its reputation
as a fighting machine.
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