Farragut was naturally conservative, as seamen generally tend to be; but while averse to sudden changes, and prone to look with some distrust upon new and untried weapons of war, he did not refuse them, nor did they find in him that prejudice which forbids a fair trial and rejects reasonable proof. Of ironclads and rifled guns, both which in his day were still in their infancy, he at times spoke disparagingly; but his objection appears to have arisen not from a doubt of their efficacy--the one for protection, the other for length of range--but from an opinion as to their effect upon the spirit of the service. In this there is an element of truth as well as of prejudice; for the natural tendency of the extreme effort for protection undoubtedly is to obscure the fundamental truth, which he constantly preached, that the best protection is to injure the enemy. Nor was his instinct more at fault in recognizing that the rage for material advance, though a good thing, carries with it the countervailing disposition to rely upon perfected material rather than upon accomplished warriors to decide the issue of battle. To express a fear such as Farragut's, that a particular development of the material of war would injure the tone of the service, sounds to some as the mere echo of Lever's commissary, who reasoned that the abolition of pig-tails would sap the military spirit of the nation--only that, and nothing more. It was, on the contrary, the accurate intuition of a born master of war, who feels, even without reasoning, that men are always prone to rely upon instruments rather than upon living agents--to think the armor greater than the man.