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This has been pronounced by Jurien de la Gravière the best of all Napoleon's plans: it exposed ships that had long been in harbour only to a short ocean voyage, and it was free from the complexity of the later and more grandiose schemes. Villeneuve was thereupon appointed to succeed him, while Missiessy held command at Rochefort.
Perhaps one reason is that they do not know how difficult it is: that they do not realize the extraordinary complexity of modern ships and engines, and the trained skill required to handle them; that they do not realize what Great Britain now realizes, that we must prepare for one of the most stupendous struggles ever carried on; that we must have a personnel both of officers and enlisted men trained to the highest point, because they will have to meet officers and enlisted men trained to the highest point; that the training must be such that the skill produced can be exercised by night and day, in cold and heat, in storm and calm, under circumstances of the utmost possible difficulty and danger; that, while it takes four years to build a ship and get her into the fleet as an effective unit, it takes much longer to train an enlisted petty officer as he should be trained, and a lifetime to train officers of the upper grades.
At first sight, the Oriental rhetoric does not please our Western taste. Life in the East wants the complexity of European and American existence; and in the writing of the primitive nations a certain monotony betrays the poverty of the landscape, and of social conditions. Every word in Arabic is said to be derived from the camel, the horse, or the sheep.
This phenomenon springs, doubtless, from the circumstance that the property is supposed to become the domain of a new group, so that any dealing with it, in its divided state, is a transaction between two highly complex bodies. I have already compared Ancient Law to Modern International Law, in respect of the size and complexity of the corporate associations, whose rights and duties it settles.
Language is a device evolved sometimes by leaps and bounds, and sometimes exceedingly slowly, whereby we help ourselves alike to greater ease, precision, and complexity of thought, and also to more convenient interchange of thought among ourselves. Thought found rude expression, which gradually among other forms assumed that of words.
We are not yet in a condition to grapple with it, but we shall be by-and-by. Meanwhile we may profitably glance back on the web of relations which these experiments reveal to us. We have, firstly, in solar light an agent of exceeding complexity, composed of innumerable constituents, refrangible in different degrees.
The entire effect depends upon the employment of a rhythmical complexity and subtlety which is utterly alien to Saxon prose. It would be foolish to claim a superiority for either of the two styles; it would be still more foolish to suppose that the effects of one might be produced by means of the other.
Yet here at the outset an almost insuperable difficulty confronts us in the extreme complexity of the matter.
It is explicable only when we remember that to the unspoiled conscience of man as man democracy will ever be the most self-evident of truths. It is the complexity of our civilization that blinds us to its self-evidence, teaching us to acquiesce in irrational privilege as inevitable, and at last to see nothing strange in being ruled by a class, whether of nobles or of mere parliamentarians.
Another feature of social progress which we have not yet mentioned in this chapter, though we have noted it repeatedly in earlier chapters, is the increased complexity of social organization. This increased complexity is in part due to the mere increase in numbers. It is also due to the various processes themselves by which wider and more universal adaptation is brought about in society.
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