There is more doubt as to how far the navy was prepared for a great war by the possession of a definite system or order of battle. According to the prevailing opinion, an English fleet was a collection of ships which fought pell-mell, each as it best could, and as the spirit of its captain caused it to be handled. This is a view which I find myself unable to accept. It has, in my opinion, both probability and direct evidence against it. In the first place, it is difficult to conceive that any force consisting of ships ranging in number from forty to nearly a hundred can possibly have been moved about, directed against an enemy, and led to victory, unless it had had some understood formation which the commander could use, and the individual captains were familiar with. A fighting force which goes in no kind of order is a thing one finds it hard to imagine--provided, of course, that it is also supposed to be efficient. The most barbarous tribes of warriors have some method of marshalling a host. The most rudimentary common-sense will teach the most backward of mankind that they cannot fight at all unless they move together on the enemy, help one another, and put each individual of their body in such a position that he can use his weapons. The same experience must have taught the seamen of the middle of the seventeenth century the same lesson. Unless they had been incredibly stupid, they could not possibly think of rushing into battle with an enemy so formidable as the Dutch, without some more or less definite idea how they were to bring their whole power to bear upon him. It is true that they did not write essays on tactics, but this only proves that the time was not given to writing about the operations of war at sea, while the want of minutely precise fighting orders may, in the light of the later history of our navy, be considered as rather a proof of sagacity than of the want of knowledge.