The decision of the Court therefore was, in substance, that in bearing down upon the enemy Byng did not do wrong in starting upon a line oblique to them; but that he should have steered such a course, and maintained such spread of sail, graduated to the speed of the slowest ship in the fleet, that all should reach point-blank range at the same time, and be then ranged on a line parallel to that of the enemy. "When on the starboard tack, the admiral should have tacked the fleet all together and immediately conducted it on a direct course for the enemy; … each ship steering for her opposite ship in the enemy's line, and under such sail as might have enabled the worst sailing ship, under all her plain sail, to preserve her station." It is needless to insist with any naval man, or to any soldier, that such an advance, in orderly fashion, oblique to the front, is unattainable except by long drill, while this fleet had been but a few weeks assembled; and the difficulty is enhanced when each ship has not only to keep its station in line, but to reach a particular enemy, who may not be just where he ought, having respect to the British order. The manoeuvre favored by the Court for the fleet as a whole was in fact just that which Byng attempted for his own division, with the results that have been narrated. These were aggravated by his mismanagement, but did not originate from it.
The invariable result of an attack thus attempted, however vigorously made, was that the van of the assailant got into action first, receiving the brunt of the enemy's fire without proper support. Not infrequently, it also underwent a second hammering from the enemy's rear, precisely in the same way as occurred in Byng's action; and whether this happened or not depended more upon the enemy than upon the British rear. In ignoring, therefore, the idea of combining an attack in superior numbers upon a part of the enemy, and adopting instead that of an onslaught upon his whole, all along the line, the British practice of the eighteenth century not only surrendered the advantage which the initiative has, of effecting a concentration, but subjected their own fleets to being beaten in detail, subject only to the skill of the opponent in using the opportunity extended to him. The results, at best, were indecisive, tactically considered. The one apparent exception was in June, 1794, when Lord Howe, after long vainly endeavoring a better combination with a yet raw fleet, found himself forced to the old method; but although then several ships were captured, this issue seems attributable chiefly to the condition of the French Navy, greatly fallen through circumstances foreign to the present subject. It was with this system that Rodney was about to break, the first of his century formally to do so. A false tactical standard, however, was not the only drawback under which the British Navy labored in 1739. The prolonged series of wars, which began when the establishment of civil order under Cromwell permitted the nation to turn from internal strife to external interests, had been for England chiefly maritime. They had recurred at brief intervals, and had been of such duration as to insure a continuity of experience and development. Usage received modification under the influence of constant warlike practice, and the consequent changes in methods, if not always thoroughly reasoned, at the least reflected a similar process of professional advance in the officers of the service. This was consecutively transmitted, and by the movement of actual war was prevented from stagnating and hardening into an accepted finality. Thus the service and its officers, in the full performance of their functions, were alive and growing. Nor was this all. The same surroundings that promoted this healthful evolution applied also a continual test of fitness to persons. As each war began, there were still to be found in the prime of vigor and usefulness men whose efficiency had been proved in its predecessor, and thus the line of sustained ability in leadership was carried on from one naval generation to another, through the sixty-odd years, 1652-1713, over which these conditions extended.
The peace of Utrecht in 1713 put an end to this period. A disputed succession after the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, renewed the condition of internal disquietude which had paralyzed the external action of England under Charles I.; and this co-operated with the mere weariness of war, occasioned by prolonged strife, to give both the country and the navy a temporary distaste to further military activity. The man of the occasion, who became the exponent and maintainer of this national inclination, was Sir Robert Walpole; to whom, during his ministry of over twenty years, can fairly be applied Jefferson's phrase concerning himself, that his "passion was peace." But, whatever the necessity to the country of such a policy, it too often results, as it did in both these cases, in neglect of the military services, allowing the equipment to decay, and tending to sap the professional interest and competency of the officers.
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.
It is these two factors, therefore, an erroneous standard and a lethargic peace, which principally caused the weakness of the British official staff for battle service at the period of lowest descent, which was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but was prolonged and intensified by a protracted interval of professional apathy. Other grievous evils doubtless existed, serious defects in administration, involving indifferent equipment, bad and scanty provisions, inferior physique in the ships' companies, and wretched sanitary arrangements; but while all these unquestionably gravely affected general efficiency for war, they belonged rather to the civil than the military side of the profession. In the hour of battle it was not these, but the tone and efficiency of the officers, that chiefly told. A false pattern of action had been accepted at a moment favorable to its perpetuation, when naval warfare on the grand scale had ceased, owing to the decline of the principal enemy, the navy of France; while the average competency of naval officers had been much lowered through want of professional