The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things were done.  He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how they could have been got up and down the Beardmore.  He is scandalized because 30 lbs. of geological specimens were deliberately added to the weight of the sledge that was dragging the life out of the men who had to haul it; but he does not realize that it is the friction surfaces of the snow on the runners which mattered and not the dead weight, which in this case was almost negligible.  Nor does he know that these same specimens dated a continent and may elucidate the whole history of plant life.  He will admit that we were all very wonderful, very heroic, very beautiful and devoted:  that our exploits gave a glamour to our expedition that Amundsen’s cannot claim; but he has no patience with us, and declares that Amundsen was perfectly right in refusing to allow science to use up the forces of his men, or to interfere for a moment with his single business of getting to the Pole and back again.  No doubt he was; but we were not out for a single business:  we were out for everything we could add to the world’s store of knowledge about the Antarctic.

Of course the whole business simply bristles with “ifs”:  If Scott had taken dogs and succeeded in getting them up the Beardmore:  if we had not lost those ponies on the Depot Journey:  if the dogs had not been taken so far and the One Ton Depot had been laid:  if a pony and some extra oil had been depoted on the Barrier:  if a four-man party had been taken to the Pole:  if I had disobeyed my instructions and gone on from One Ton, killing dogs as necessary:  or even if I had just gone on a few miles and left some food and fuel under a flag upon a cairn:  if they had been first at the Pole:  if it had been any other season but that....  But always the bare fact remains that Scott could not have travelled from McMurdo Sound to the Pole faster than he did except with dogs; all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not have done it.  Why, then, says the practical man, did we go to McMurdo Sound instead of to the Bay of Whales?  Because we gained that continuity of scientific observation which is so important in this work:  and because the Sound was the starting-point for continuing the exploration of the only ascertained route to the Pole, via the Beardmore Glacier.

I am afraid it was all inevitable:  we were as wise as any one can be before the event.  I admit that we, scrupulously economical of our pemmican, were terribly prodigal of our man-power.  But we had to be:  the draft, whatever it may have been on the whole, was not excessive at any given point; and anyhow we just had to use every man to take every opportunity.  There is so much to do, and the opportunities for doing it are so rare.  Generally speaking, I don’t see how we could have done differently, but I don’t want to see it done again; I don’t want it to be necessary to do it again.  I want to see this country tackle the job, and send enough men to do one thing at a time.  They do it in Canada:  why not in England too?