And the British navy not only had a naval tradition behind it, but a tradition of advance in ability to use and save energy on the sea. British seamen had learned more of the art of sea-fighting than had their opponents. In the early days in which hand-to-hand combat was the only method of conducting warfare, fighting on sea was much the same as fighting on land. Opposing fleets sailed or were rowed straight at each other, and just as the compact Greek phalanx drove its way through the opposing army, so ships close together brought many men together to attack the enemy already thrown into confusion. Familiarity with the sea and conditions on the sea, and ability to handle a ship, were the chief requisites of men who wished to fight on sea. As long as the contest lay between seamen and landmen, the supremacy of the sea went to the seamen, mainly because they knew the sea and could manage ships. The Spaniards, as we have seen, were not really seamen at all, and were overthrown at sea by the Dutch and English. It was only during the sixty years after 1653 that there emerged the principle of sea-fighting wader the conditions that then existed, by which the advan tage went to those using their fighting strength most economically.
A ship has much greater length than width, and in the days when ships came to be armed with a great number of small cannon, more cannon could be pointed from the sides of a ship than from either the bow or the stern, so that ships could attack most effectively side ways ; while, for the whole of a fleet to be most effective, the sight of the enemy had never to be interrupted by a friendly ship. Thus ships giving battle must needs be in a line moving at right angles to the direction of fight ing. In order that this line should be equally strong at all points, only ships of a certain strength could be allowed in it. These ships were the line-of-battle ships. Fighting thus became something different from going straight at an enemy. Wind conditions required to be taken into account, even more than before. The fleet to windward had the advantage of choosing whether or not to attack, but if it did attack it was at a certain disadvantage, in that it required to sail straight at the enemy, in which case few cannon could be used, or it came into action gradually and the first ships were greatly damaged. If it was defeated it had little chance of escape. The fleet to leeward had not the choice of attack, but had a better chance of escape, and while being attacked could cripple the enemy. It is significant that even in the war of American Independence, when France was attacking Britain, the British fleets habitu ally chose the windward station and the French the leeward station.
This characteristic difference of action was not an accident ; it was due to the fact that, partly as a result of greater experience, the British seamen knew more of naval warfare and of the principles of naval warfare.
Important military stations are chosen on land because their positions are advantageous for defence or attack. Some lands, like Egypt and Chaldea, are naturally defended by deserts or marshes ; cities like Rome or Paris are at positions where they can most easily repel attack. But on the sea there is no one place more easily defended than another. There are, in the military sense, no " positions." This by greater experience the British seamen had learned. They had learned, too, consciously or unconsciously, that, as a result of this, the best defence was attack, not on the enemy's coast, but on his fleet, wherever it could be found, since the fleet afforded the only means by which Britain might be invaded. They had learned that more was saved in the long run by a greater expenditure to start with; while Frenchmen were naturally inclined to a more cautious policy, to keeping fleets in harbour when not actually required, and not attacking unless sure of victory. The one endeavoured to increase the amount of stored energy by spending, the other to hoard and save what was already stored. Britain had found that the former gave the better results in commerce and in war.
And their greater experience, too, gave them a better chance of finding out methods by which attacks might be made to obtain the best result ; how a smaller force might defeat a larger by using advantages of wind, or of the momentum of ships in motion.
The War of American Independence, then, came to an end, mainly because the resources—the stored energies— of France were exhausted; and this was no new thing, for we have seen that there had been for a century a continual drain on the resources of France without any corresponding supply. The government, centralized in Paris, was able to keep up appearances by forcing from the scattered tillers of the soil the supplies that were necessary, but this had only made them the poorer and the less able to get the best out of the land, so that the poorer classes in the towns naturally suffered also from want of food.
When this state of affairs at length resulted in revolu tion, though the monarchy was overthrown and though the constitutional States-General, turned into a National Assembly, lost the power it had apparently secured, yet the centralizing power of Paris, which underlay the original centralized power of the king, brought about a change of government against which through the length and breadth of France there was no revolt that had any chance of success ; each revolt, whether in the Rhone Valley, in Bordeaux, in the Vendee, or in Brittany, whether against Republicanism as such, or the particular form of it in power at the time, was isolated from the others and was easily attacked and put down from Paris.