In the light of such an incident, the question I would like to pose will receive of course but one answer. Was the work on which the general was engaged in his private office, this work of a student, was it “practical”? Or can it by any reasonable method be so divorced from what followed, that the word “practical” only applies farther on. Did he only begin to be practical when he got into his carriage to drive from the Tuileries, or did the practical begin when he joined the army, or when the first gun of the campaign was fired? Or, on the other hand, if he had passed that time, given to studying the campaign, in arranging for a new development of the material of war, and so had gone with his plans undeveloped, would he not have done a thing very far from “practical”? But we must push our inquiry a little farther back to get the full significance of Bourrienne’s story. Whence came the facility and precision with which Bonaparte planned the great campaign of Marengo? Partly, unquestionably, from a native genius rarely paralleled; partly, but not by any means wholly. Hear his own prescription: “If any man will be a great general, let him study.” Study what? “Study history. Study the campaigns of the great generals—Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar” (who never smelt gunpowder, nor dreamed of ironclads) “as well as those of Turenne, Frederick, and myself, Napoleon.” Had Bonaparte entered his cabinet to plan the campaign of Marengo, with no other preparation than his genius, without the mental equipment and the ripened experience that came from knowledge of the past, acquired by study, he would have come unprepared. Were, then, his previous study and reflection, for which the time of action had not come, were they not “practical,” because they did not result in immediate action? Would they even have been “not practical” if the time for action had never come to him? As the wise man said, “There is a time for everything under the sun,” and the time for one thing cannot be used as the time for another. That there is time for action, all concede; few consider duly that there is also a time for preparation. To use the time of preparation for preparation is practical, whatever the method; to postpone preparation to the time for action is not practical. Our new navy is preparing now; it can scarcely be said, as regards its material, to be yet ready. The day of grace is still with us—or with those who shall be the future captains and admirals. There is time yet for study; there is time to imbibe the experience of the past, to become imbued, steeped, in the eternal principles of war, by the study of its history and of the maxims of its masters. But the time of preparation will pass; some day the time of action will come. Can an admiral then sit down and re-enforce his intellectual grasp of the problem before him by a study of history, which is simply a study of past experience? Not so; the time of action is upon him, and he must trust to his horse sense.