exactly the same result was obtained, at the same cost, in one hour--of which twenty minutes was at almost point-blank range--in this action, as was got by two ships in three hours in the _Leipzig_ action, and by two battle-cruisers in five hours in the battle cruiser action. It would be a mistake to assume that we see a new contrast in methods in these engagements. _Kent_ certainly followed the Nelsonian tradition. He closed with his enemy at top speed, and got not only the full artillery value of his attack, by making hitting easier and therefore more certain, but won what is hardly less valuable, the vast moral advantage of giving his enemy no breathing time at all. There are fifty parallels to this, of which Trafalgar is in fact only the supreme example. Given a superior force of guns--obtained by Nelson by the concentration of the whole of his fleet on the centre and rear of the enemy--the tactical plan is to be found in the method of bringing these guns to do their work in the shortest possible time. We can find many exact parallels to Admiral Sturdee’s tactics in the war of 1812, for the Americans employed them against us with the utmost success on several occasions. Indeed, it was these victories that led first to a practical revival of gunnery skill--brought about with such effect by Broke--and later to Sir Howard Douglas’s effort to create a scientific study of gunnery in the British Navy. It is now nearly a hundred years since his historic work on naval gunnery was published. His father had been one of Howe’s captains and had invented an important improvement in naval guns. The son entered the Artillery, and his education, no less than his family tradition, made him both an interested observer and a very competent critic of the naval gunnery of the period. He had, in his own words, witnessed “the triumphant and undisputed domination of the British marine,” after the victories of Nelson had swept continental fleets from the sea, and then, seven years after Trafalgar, he had seen this triumphant navy utterly humiliated by the Americans in the war of 1812. He analyzed the causes both of the triumph and the humiliation, and was, perhaps, the first to lay down the most important of all maxims of naval doctrine--then and still also the most neglected.