Such were the Fathers of admiralty as to-day we envisage it; and, dark as some of our naval pages have since been, their tradition has never died, or lacked among us sons to sustain and adorn it in larger issues. There have been times when the country in general and its statesmen in particular have lost or under-valued their sea-vision. In 1667, less than eighty years after the defeat of the Armada, and scarcely ten after the death of Blake, one of the greatest figures in English naval history, to such a pass had our naval administration come that the Dutch were able to sail almost unchallenged up the Medway; to destroy the booms and half-equipped battleships; to capture the _Royal Charles_ as a trophy; for several weeks to blockade London; and, in the end, to compel the English Government to a disadvantageous peace. Fortunately that was a lesson that England never forgot, and, though there were to follow lapses, not a few, in the struggles that followed against the lust for world-power, first of Louis XVI, and, a hundred {xxviii} later, of Napoleon, the navy of England played a not unworthy and probably a decisive part. In Hawke and Rodney and Hood, and supremely in Nelson, in their unremembered captains and too-often ill-requited men, the spirit of the great Elizabethans lived again and ultimately prevailed, as it was bound to do. Not less for peoples in the comity of nations than for individuals in smaller societies, the highest task is to put at the disposal of human progress their characteristic genius. In military capacity, never the equal of France; behind many other nations in certain of the arts and sciences; lacking the spiritual insight of the East and the buoyant versatility of the West, this maritime adequacy, this gift of admiralty, seems, by virtue of her history, to have been allotted to Britain--and she has always been at her greatest, both for herself and for mankind, when she and her statesmen have realized this most fully. That among her seamen this conception was as strong as ever, the history of the Great War has abundantly made clear, little as most of them dreamed, on that July morning, to be described in our first chapter, that they were on the verge of an ordeal, in which humanity's fate would lie in their hands as never in history. And yet, had they been gifted with a vision of what was to come, certain doubts might well have been pardoned in them. Colossal as the machinery was, it was largely untried. New methods and engines, with unforeseeable possibilities, were already in embryo or in actual being. The submarine, the airship, the mine--in less than half an hour, a fleet might be at the bottom. Recent {xxix} naval campaigns had shown that, whereas a century before, it had been the exception for a stricken ship to sink, it was now the exception for it to float; and what of the men in a modern naval battle?