tenable. The Dutch themselves do not even claim the invention of the
line. Indeed in no foreign authority, either Dutch, French or Spanish,
have I been able to discover a claim to the invention of any device in
sailing tactics that had permanent value. Even the famous tactical
school which was established in France at the close of the Seven
Years' War, and by which the French service so brilliantly profited in
the War of American Independence, was worked on the old lines of
Hoste's treatise. Morogues' _Tactique Navale_ was its text-book,
and his own teaching was but a scientific and intelligent elaboration
of a system from which the British service under the impulse of Anson,
Hawke, and Boscawen was already shaking itself free.

Much of the old learning which the volume contains is of course of
little more than antiquarian interest, but the bulk of it in the
opinion of those best able to judge should be found of living value.
All systems of tactics must rest ultimately on the dominant weapon in
use, and throughout the sailing period the dominant weapon was, as
now, the gun. In face of so fundamental a resemblance no tactician
can afford to ignore the sailing system merely because the method of
propulsion and the nature of the material have changed. It is not the
principles of tactics that such changes affect, but merely the method
of applying them.

Of even higher present value is the process of thought, the line of
argument by which the old tacticians arrived at their conclusions good
and bad. In studying the long series of Instructions we are able to
detach certain attitudes of mind which led to the atrophy of
principles essentially good, and others which pushed the system
forward on healthy lines and flung off obsolete restraints. In an art
so shifting and amorphous as naval tactics, the difference between