become 'chicken-hearted' tended to produce in the Colonies 'swelled heads,' When, therefore, ghastly proof was given that wars had not ceased, and international antagonisms, prompted by self-interest, were as rampant as ever, colonial attention turned towards precautions for defence of a purely local and sedentary form. These general considerations must be borne in mind, for they indicate the genesis of the present relations of the Colonies to the navy.
It now remains to examine more closely their special bearing on the problem of Imperial defence.
The concentration of an army at Boulogne for the declared purpose of invading England produced a variety of purely military efforts to improvise local means of resistance to the attempt, if really made. These temporary and purely military measures were contrary to the teachings of insular experience of wars, which in effect were that when fighting had to be done, success lay not in accumulation of means of sedentary defence at home, but in active and combined offensive operations abroad. The fact that our fathers immediately increased the fleet—at the very moment when a decisive victory had left maritime rivals impotent for harm—had its corollary in the cessation of efforts, and expenditure on passive and purely military defence at home. Trafalgar was the necessary prelude to that long series of purely military operations by which alone decisive results can be achieved and peace secured to any nation. Owing to this policy, the sea-power of Britain was, subsequently to Trafalgar, so effectively operative by moral influence alone, that down to the close of the Napoleonic War the navy had no opportunity of further illustrating its dramatic power of destruction. Popular interest, therefore, focussed itself upon the army, and during the long peace the memories of the great war were prominently military. Then came the Crimean War, where an alliance between the two greatest maritime nations of the world left nothing for the Russian Navy to do but to sink their ships, and little for the
