The Navy as a Fighting Machine | Page 9

feel bound together.
This we must all admit, even the heathen know it; but where do we see
any evidence of the sweetening effect of Christianity in the dealings of
one organization with another with which it has no special bonds of
friendship? Christianity is invoked in every warring nation now to
stimulate the patriotic spirit of the nation and intensify the hate of the
crowd against the enemy; and even if we think that such invoking is a
perversion of religious influence to unrighteous ends, we must admit
the fact that the Christian religion itself is at this moment being made to
exert a powerful influence--not toward peace but toward war! And this
should not amaze us; for where does the Bible say or intimate that love
among nations will ever be brought about? The Saviour said: "I bring

not peace but a sword." So what reasonable hope does even Christianity
give us that war between nations will cease? And even if it did give
reasonable hope, let us realize that between reasonable hope and
reasonable expectation there is a great gulf fixed.
Therefore, we seem forced to the conclusion that the world will move
in the future in the same direction as in the past; that nations will
become larger and larger and fewer and fewer, the immediate
instrument of international changes being war; and that certain nations
will become very powerful and nearly dominate the earth in turn, as
Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, France, and Great Britain have done--and
as some other country soon may do.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, a certain law of decadence seems
to have prevailed, because of which every nation, after acquiring great
power, has in turn succumbed to the enervating effects which seem
inseparable from it, and become the victim of some newer nation that
has made strenuous preparations for long years, in secret, and finally
pounced upon her as a lion on its prey.
Were it not for this tendency to decadence, we should expect that the
nations of the earth would ultimately be divided into two great nations,
and that these would contend for the mastery in a world-wide struggle.
But if the present rate of invention and development continues,
improvements in the mechanic arts will probably cause such increase in
the power of weapons of destruction, and in the swiftness and sureness
of transportation and communication, that some _monster of
efficiency_ will have time to acquire world mastery before her period
of decadence sets in.
In this event, wars will be of a magnitude besides which the present
struggle will seem pygmy; and will rage over the surface of the earth,
for the gaining and retaining of the mastery of the world.
CHAPTER II
NAVAL A, B, C

In order to realize what principles govern the use of navies, let us first
consider what navies have to do and get history's data as to what navies
in the past have done. It would obviously be impossible to recount here
all the doings of navies. But neither is it necessary; for the reason that,
throughout the long periods of time in which history records them, their
activities have nearly always been the same.
In all cases in which navies have been used for war there was the
preliminary dispute, often long-continued, between two peoples or their
rulers, and at last the decision of the dispute by force. In all cases the
decision went to the side that could exert the most force at the critical
times and places. The fact that the causes of war have been civil, and
not military, demands consideration, for the reason that some people,
confusing cause and effect, incline to the belief that armies and navies
are the cause of war, and that they are to be blamed for its horrors.
History clearly declares the contrary, and shows that the only rôle of
armies and navies has been to wage wars, and, by waging, to finish
them.
It may be well here, in order to clear away a possible preconception by
the reader, to try and dispel the illusion that army and navy officers are
eager for war, in order that they may get promotion. This idea has been
exploited by people opposed to the development of the army and navy,
and has been received with so much credulity that it seriously
handicaps the endeavors of officers to get an unbiassed hearing. But
surely the foolishness of such an idea would promptly disappear from
the brain of any one if he would remind himself that simply because a
man joins the army or navy he does not cease to be a human being,
with the same emotions of fear as other men, the same sensitiveness to
pain, the same dread of death, and the same horror of