The reader will very likely detect in the foregoing category of precedence a trite maxim of Napoleon’s elaborated into a series of sonorous, if illustrative, commonplaces. But this is a matter in which, even at the cost of being hackneyed, it is absolutely necessary that certain points should be clearly established. First, looking at the whole subject of sea force as a problem in dynamics, it should be constantly before our eyes that a navy is so highly complex an affair that it can only act rightly when _all_ the elements of which it is composed are employed in accord with the principles peculiar to each, and are combined so that each takes its due place in relation to the rest. It is, for example, quite conceivable that you might have a fleet or a flotilla equipped with the best material, its personnel instructed and expert in the best methods, commanded in detail and directed by the chief command according to the soundest principles of tactics and strategy, and yet that such a unit might fail in winning its legitimate purpose, simply because of some failure to base its operations on correct data. The omission to provide all the means for obtaining intelligence that science and experience suggest, or, having employed them and got the raw material, an inability to interpret and transmit it rightly and promptly to the officer in command, might send a fleet upon its mission either to the wrong place or at the wrong time, or with the wrong dispositions. In considering naval science, then, it is, so to speak, axiomatic to recognize that, as its extent and variety are almost infinite, the task of elucidating and teaching its principles and their application, so that every person making up the organism which is to set the science into action shall act in the light of true doctrine, requires an intellectual effort of incalculable magnitude, just because the dynamic laws governing each element are extraordinarily obscure, and because the number of elements is so extraordinarily great. To be part perfect, then, may vitiate the whole effort. But if a whole science must be explored and its principles universally inculcated, it would seem as if a wholly untenable ideal was being put forward. But there is no escape from this ideal. For the laws of science are ruthless. Just as “the wages of sin is death,” so is failure the fruit of false doctrine. And the cruelty of the things lies in this, that what seems an almost infinitesimal infidelity may bring a large and noble effort, greatly conceived and gallantly executed, to disaster.