heard that snobbishness prevails in the service now only in a less triumphant degree to what it did in Nelson’s time.  If that be the case, it ought to be wrestled with until every vestige of the ugly thing is strangled.  The letters of Nelson to personal friends, to the Admiralty, and in his reported conversations, are all full of resentment at the viciousness of it, though he obviously struggles to curb the vehemence of his feelings.  No one felt the dagger of the reticent stabber more quickly and sensitively than he.  Invisible though the libeller might be, Nelson knew he was there.  He could not hear the voice, but he felt the sinister action.

Making full allowance for what might be put down to imagination, there is still an abundance of material to justify the belief that the first naval authority of his time was the target of snobs, and that, but for his strong personality and the fact that he was always ready to fight them in the open, he would have been superseded, and a gallant duffer might have taken his place, to the detriment of our imperial interests.  It is a dangerous experiment to put a man into high office if he has not the instinct of judging the calibre of other men.  This applies to every department of life nowadays.  Take the Army, the Navy, departments of State, commercial or banking offices, manufacturing firms, and the making of political appointments.  The latter is more carelessly dealt with than any other department of life.  The public are not sufficiently vigilant in distinguishing between a mere entertaining rhetorician and a wholesome-minded, natural-born statesman.  What terrible calamities have come to the State through putting men into responsible positions they have neither training, wit, nor wisdom to fill efficiently!  Providence has been most indulgent and forbearing when we have got ourselves into a mess by wrong-headedness.  She generally comes to our aid with an undiscovered man or a few men with the necessary gifts required for getting us out of the difficulty in which the Yellow Press gang and their accomplices may have involved the country.  We know something of how the knowledge of these anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson, but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days.  This lonely soul lived the life of a recluse for months at a time.  The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God’s works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even on the most phlegmatic mind, but to the mystically constituted brain of Nelson, under all the varied thoughts that came into his brain during the days and nights of watching and searching for those people he termed “the pests of the human race,” it must have been one long heartache.  No wonder that he lets fly at the Admiralty in some of his most passionate