530 
COAST DEFENCE IN RELATION TO WAR. 
to modern discovery. Principles are thus effectually obscured, and 
matters of secondary importance become the first objects of discussion, 
while policy drifts, or is allowed to be dragged, in the train of mere 
subordinate detail. 
Coast Defence appears to be peculiarly liable to danger of this nature. 
It offers an enticing field to the clever scientist. Weapons of every 
class claim a part in its sphere, and the advocates of each are filled with 
conviction. Standing on the border, where sea and land meet, it has 
a dual aspect—naval and military—by which a confusion of ideas is apt 
to be engendered. Moreover, the war record of Coast Defences has 
been little studied, and is intimately bound up with those great lessons 
of naval history which are only now beginning to be rightly under¬ 
stood. 
Under such conditions the instability of opinion, of which there have 
been notable examples, is easily explained. 
In 1786 the apparent weakness of the defences of Portsmouth and 
Plymouth gave rise to a strong demand for a heavy expenditure on 
Coast fortification, supported by a powerful Prime Minister. This was 
a period between great wars and threatened invasions. The British 
Navy had not by any means asserted the supremacy subsequently at¬ 
tained, and had even been overweighted during the struggle with the 
American Colonies. 
Nevertheless, it was naval opinion which secured the defeat of pro¬ 
jects, to which Pitt lent all the weight of his great influence in 
Parliament. If ever Great Britain required Coast Defence on a large 
scale, this would appear to have been the period; but the experience of 
war seems to have led the minds of that day to the opposite conclusion. 
By the year 1859, however, the great naval leaders had passed away. 
Lord St. Vincent, whose views prevailed in 1789, had been dead for 
36 years, and the teaching of war was forgotten so completely that 
Lord Palmerston found a Royal Commission willing to recommend an 
expenditure of 11 millions on mere fixed defences. Conjecture during 
a long period of peace at sea—not necessity proved in war—thus 
sufficed to bring about a change in the policy of a nation, and to raise 
an artificial standard of requirement which has entailed consequences 
far reaching. 
The standard and the popular ideas to-day are unquestionably based 
on the theorising of 1859—not on the wide experience of the French 
wars. France had inaugurated an era of Coast fortification. We, as 
frequently happens, thought it necessary to follow suit, without pausing 
to work out our problem in accordance with our own special conditions. 
As illustrating what is, it is to be hoped, the zenith of the Coast 
Defence mania, I may point to the proposals of the United States’ 
Board on Fortification which sat in 1885. This body demanded, in all 
seriousness, an expenditure of millions sterling for the local defence 
of a port so extremely fortunate in its geographical position as San 
Francisco. 
The inevitable inference seems to be that first principles were wholly 
ignored, that the questions—-how, by whom, from where, and with what 
object can this place be attacked ?—never even suggested themselves. 
