ceptance of the new conditions, and the vigorous grapple with the new problems. Yet in Hornby you detect no trace of the passive, half-sulky obstruction with which some of the older officers of our own, and still more of foreign services, have chosen to meet the growing domination of the inventer in naval warfare. Indeed it says more than any volume could say for the candour and elasticity of his mind that the man who clung to sail to the last, and never ceased to lament its disappearance, became none the less the prime master of steam tactics in his as later days. "Being obliged to resort to steam, which always goes against the grain with me;" "All I can say is, 'More's the pity that it should be so rare a thing to see a ship come into harbour under sail’"-such passages these follow each other punctually. Yet as early as 1863-only four years after the laying down of the Warrior we hear the note of sturdy common - sense. "When these men sit down to plan a warship propelled by steam," he writes, after a visit to Glasgow, "they make a steamship of her, and don't go puddling on drawing large sailing-ships to put engines into." Three years before he had written from the Mediterranean, where Sir William Martin was making the first experiments in steam tactics: "It is no use fancying that steamships can only form as sailing-ships used to do; and by adhering to those ideas, instead of following the new the new systems, which have been shown to be possible under most circumstances, we are throwing away the advantages that steam has given us." Probably the men of this generation can never appreciate the degree of robust honesty, even of self-abnegation, which a sailor of Hornby's traditions needed thus to bridge the past and the future. Sir Geoffrey Hornby's life was not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, an eventful one. After his one brief glimpse of active service in the Mediterranean he served on the Cape station, and afterwards as flaglieutenant to his father in the Pacific. He was captain of the Tribune at Vancouver Island in 1889 when the San Juan boundary question arose with the United States, and it was due largely to his happy combination of dignity and tact that war was averted on that occasion. After a commission. in the Mediterranean, he was Commodore on the West African station. While there he strongly advocated the combination of all the African stations into one command, so as to give the crews a change of climate. Seeing that he lost twentytwo men by yellow fever in less than a month, it is perhaps less wonderful that Hornby advocated the reform than that it was afterwards carried out. He next commanded the Flying Squadron on an eighteen months' voyage round the world. The mention of this suggests the question whether it would not be advisable to resuscitate this squadron, and thus to train our officers and sailors in the best possible school by sending them round the world in the best ships under the best superior officers we can find. The present system of using for the so-called Training Squadron old ships and old guns, which are fit for no other service in the world, is rather like teaching a soldier his business by casing him in plate armour and exercising him with a bow and arrow. A squadron of our newest cruisers steaming round the world would train men in the sort of ships and machines they may some day be called on to fight. It would inure them to every kind of climate and weather. Further, it would display the flag all over the world, and do away with one excuse for keeping some of our best men in obsolete tubs on distant stations, when the first days of war would hand them over helpless to the first modern enemy they might encounter. From the Flying Squadron Hornby went to command in the Channel, and thence to the Mediterranean. How much his blended discretion and firmness did to keep Russia out of Constantinople and Britain out of war, readers of Mrs Egerton's book may see for themselves. But the dominant impression of this chapter is not an agreeable one. To Hornby more than to any one Englishman it fell at this crisis to steer the country between war and dis honour. Yet the Government at home appears to have kept him systematically ignorant of its intentions. It may be, of course, that it was ignorant of them itself. Yet it is difficult not to blush in reading the correspondence between the Admiral and the First Lord. "The further," writes Hornby to the late W. H. Smith, "I can be informed of your views, consistently with State secrets, the more I believe I should be able to prepare to carry them out." They appear to have consistently ignored his representations as to the fortification of the lines of Bulair, above Gallipoli. It might have It might have been indiscreet to take his advice; but it was surely a worse indiscretion to keep him in the dark as to the actual policy of the country-to order him to keep the Straits open, while neglecting the only means by which it was possible to keep them open. They suddenly ordered him off from Malta without giving him any coal to drive his ships. They ordered him up the Dardanelles, and then sent a despatch to meet him half-way and counter-order him down again. "I am sick of it," he writes most naturally, "and only look forward to returning to Malta." It will probably surprise British readers to learn that their foremost admiral, in command of their greatest fleet, at a time of urgent crisis, is shifted to and fro like a chess-man by the superior wisdom of Whitehall. It probably did not surprise Hornby, for he had been a Lord of the Admiralty himself. This was in 1875 and 1876, when he was Second Sea Lord, under Ward Hunt. His first task was to determine how twenty-three ironclads could be kept in commission, with one for every four of them in reserve or building, when at the end of three years there would only be twenty-four ironclads altogether. He asked two millions and a half to bring the fleet up to its proper strength, and did not get it. What wonder that he began his Mediterranean journal with the words, "I left the Admiralty with less regret and more pleasure than any work with which I have been so long connected." Here are some of the delights in the life of a naval lord : "As if for the purpose of preventing him from turning his attention to any of the important subjects of the day, he has to direct such minutiæ as whether a man recommended for a truss shall be allowed one. With a hundred such ridiculous occupations his time is engrossed, and he has to scramble through important papers without sufficient time to consider them, and to leave most reports and experiments unread. The second great fault is want of unity of plan. . Of course there is no feeling of connection between the permanent officials and the service, and therefore no care how the work succeeds afloat. The office is looked on as a department of the Civil Service. . . . It is not to be wondered at that a naval man, who comes there to work for the benefit of that service in which he takes pride, should be disappointed and disgusted to find himself in company with those who have great powers of obstruction, and no desire to advance the service." Of course the Admiralty-like the Government of Turkey-is always reforming, and doubtless this sketch of its workings is long since obsolete. It does not, however, appear to have been altogether out of date six years later, when Tryon was Permanent Secretary. At that time no lord ever saw the letter written from his minute, and a Secretary who knew something about the Navy was found very useful in correcting the miscellaneous blunders which arise from the system. In his tenure of the office, as at all other times, Tryon proved himself, what Admiral Fitzgerald calls him, a type of the true reformers of the Navy. The impulse to reform may, and often has, come from without; but the execution of it must be left to the man who understands the business. While at the Admiralty Tryon laid the foundations of the Intelligence Department. As Admiral Fitzgerald well says, this is like a good many other modern institutions: we wonder how on earth we ever got on without them." It seems incredible that fifteen years ago it was nobody's business to gather the information necessary for the rational prosecution of war. If we had had to fight in those days, our officers would have been expected to find out the strength and nature of the enemy's force afloat and his defences ashore, by any sudden inspiration which Heaven might have vouchsafed them on the moment. And the Admiralty would have been as utterly at a loss as to the expedient organisation of their own resources as they would have been ignorant of the enemy's. Admiral Fitzgerald may well say that if Sir George Tryon had never done anything in his life but give the impetus to the institution of this Department, he would by this alone have sufficiently merited the nation's gratitude. But, as he significantly says, "Sir George Tryon was always preparing for war." So far as actual fighting goes, he saw little more of it than did Admiral Hornby. After the Crimea he was transport officer at Annesley Bay-"the hottest place on earth" during the Abyssinian War; and in 1881 he represented British interests through the French bombardment of Sfax and the subsequent Commission. His colleague at Annesley Bay was Lord Roberts, and it was stated that these two were the hardest worked men in the expedition. Both services demanded tact beyond the common endowment. Yet, masterful as he was reputed to be, Tryon won nothing but praise and gratitude from everybody concerned in both affairs. Perhaps it was rather because of his masterfulness than in spite of it; and in days when Britain has almost forgotten the diplomatic value of this quality, it is worth while to point back to the eulogies which Tryon won from the French in the Sfax affair. After this Tryon saw no more of warfare. But after this, and even before, there was no intermission in his life's task of "preparing for war." Wherever he went he was always picking up information, making or suggesting reforms in discipline and organisation, trying experiments, exercising his men, instructing his officers and himself. It would hardly be possible to find a life more single-heartedly devoted to one great purpose. "He was not one of those," says his biographer, "who preach the pusillanimous and delusive doctrine that the greatest of all British interests is peace. He knew full well, and he acted on the knowledge, that the greatest of all British interests is the defence of the British empire, and the maintenance of its honour and integrity." With this knowledge he was yet alive, as his letters show, to the value of preparation as a deterrent against attack. He realised also with a clearness very far from common in his day that the one and only barrier between the empire and ruin was its Navy. Fortune called him, in the warscare of 1885, to make suggestions for local defence to the Australian colonies, but he never gave way to the pernicious fallacy that forts can take the place of ships in defending a coast. On the contrary, he advised the colonies to restrain their fortifying zeal within reasonable bounds. What was needed was a mobile defence on land, where a body of resolute men could defeat any likely landing party, and a mobile defence at sea. How great a part he played in the formation of the special Australian squadron Admiral Fitzgerald plainly shows. Here again the work was trying, and called for almost endless tact. That he succeeded in reconciling the widely divergent views of the various colonies, and bringing the squadron into an accomplished fact, is one more contradiction of the new theory that a strong man cannot be a diplomatist. With the subsequent work of Sir George Tryon, Admiral Fitzgerald, being master of his subject, is able to deal in several chapters of the highest interest and instructiveness. One of these - upon the Naval Manœuvres in which he played so brilliant a part-we are able to consider side by side with a very luminous criticism from the last book of our five, 'The Navy and the Nation.' The manœuvres of 1888 and 1889 are especially worthy of a brief account, since they may be said to sum up almost in themselves the chief strategic principles which should govern the defence of these islands. In 1888 Tryon represented the enemy. He was blockaded in Bantry Bay, and his second-in-command in Lough Swilly. The blockading squadrons were in each case superior in force to the blockaded, though Tryon's two squadrons united were superior to either blockader singly. The result was held to demonstrate the impossibility of a close blockade under modern conditions. In these days of steam a blockaded enemy might attempt to break out at any moment, fair wind or not, and it is significant that in the case of these manœuvres the blockaders, on their own showing, were already exhausted almost to the point of raising the blockade before the very first day allowed by the Admiralty for an attempt to break through. When that day came, Tryon easily broke the blockade with his fastest ships under cover of a brilliant diversion; his coadjutor did the same, and a division from each squadron united in a raid upon the unprotected coasts of Scotland and England. Tryon's opponent fell back, to coal and to guard the mouth of the Thames ; no doubt, too, the necessity of rest was a potent advocate of a passive defence. Tryon, meanwhile, took Liverpool, while his raiding squadron did great damage. Thus he was absolutely successful in gain ing all his objects. But it is well pointed out by Mr Thursfield that his opponent would not have been thrown back on the rather futile strategy of watching the Thames had the country at that time possessed any organised system for collecting information of an enemy's movements along the coast and transmitting it to an admiral at sea. In default of such a system and of numerous fast cruisers, Tryon disappeared from the moment the blockade was raised, and there was nothing for it but to wait for him at what seemed his most likely objective. Avoiding this objective, Tryon was enabled to do vast damage to ports, towns, and shipping, although there was actually an unbeaten British fleet in being, of greatly superior strength to his own. Next year the Admiralty profited by both the lessons learned in 1888. It had been shown that the close blockade of a hostile fleet was difficult, if not impossible, without a greater preponderance of force than Tryon's opponent then possessed-greater also than Britain could then expect to possess in dealing with France alone, to say nothing of a combination of Powers. Therefore another system of blockade was adopted. The British squadrons, this year commanded by Tryon, were to lie in port, observing the enemy's squadrons by means of fast cruisers. This year, also, there had been created a system of coast signalstations connected by telegraph with headquarters. Tryon's business, then, was not to prevent his inferior enemy from putting to sea, but to prevent him from doing damage on the British coasts. He was once more brilliantly successful. His opponent tried to evade him, to send fast ships up the Channel, and to raid the Thames. Tryon disposed his fleet to cover the entrance to the Channel in such masterly fashion that not a single vessel got through. Three were taken; the others returned to their base at Queenstown. Thence they set off raiding round Scotland. Tryon shut up the enemy's slower ships in Queenstown, and sent a strong detachment after the raiders. Thanks to the new signal system, two out of the enemy's three battleships were cap. tured, and the operations closed with the British fleet supreme at every point. The lesson of 1889 was thus as consoling to the tax-payer as that of 1888 was disquieting. Certainly both might be pressed too far. It is no disparagement to Tryon's able opponent to say that superior tactical skill may in each case have been a factor in the result. But the general conclusion from the 1889 manœuvres was that with a superior British fleet in being, well provided with fast scouts and backed by an efficient system of coast intelligence, an enemy will never be able to attempt any serious enterprise against our islands. Mr Thursfield puts the point admirably. The plan of sending fast ships to evade Tryon and raid London did not, perhaps, deserve to fail; but "its failure was a better illustration of sound strategic principle than its success could possibly have been." As it was, the raid resulted in grave loss to the assailants. But even if they had got past Tryon, they could never have undertaken serious operations with his superior and unbroken fleet behind them. Admiral Fitzgerald quotes a valuable criticism of the German Admiral Batsch to the same effect. So with the subsequent raid. It happened that the raiders were all but annihi |