James Russell Soley, Professor U. S. Navy, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.1, The blockade and the cruisers
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[237] and seventy-one, two hundred and eight of which had been built or begun while hostilities were going on. Perhaps, if our next war lasts four years, and if all the sea-board cities are not destroyed during the first half-year, we may do the same again. No doubt the Administration was handicapped at the outset by its unwillingness, for reasons of public policy, to take the offensive; but even allowing for this delay, the fact remains that in the first six months—months during which, in modern wars, not only the most telling blows are struck, but the issue of the war is generally decided—all that could be done with the most strenuous efforts, and the greatest energy in the administrative head, was to collect our fragmentary resources and to discover the men who could make them available. Fortunately, we were fighting a Government that was destitute of a naval force. Had our enemy been a maritime power with a navy in the most ordinary condition of readiness, and with a competent working staff, it would have fared ill with us in the first summer. In our next war we shall probably have no such good fortune, and we shall learn to our cost the fatal result of procrastination.

It is idle to suppose, in face of the changes that mechanical science is making every year in our daily lives, that the materials of naval warfare will remain long at any given stage of development. Progress will go on, and the only way in which a naval force can be kept up which shall be equal to the barest necessities of the country is by a constant adaptation of fleets and armaments to the new demands of modern war. Objectors may say that if changes are so rapid, new constructions will shortly be superseded by newer ones. But science advances, whether Governments wish it or not; and if the navy is to be kept up at all, it must be kept up to date. New instruments of warfare cannot