To accept responsibility, however, is not always best either for the individual or for the cause; often it were better to lay the responsibility on higher authority, by asking for instructions.  But the same remark is true of all uses of courage; it is not always best to be brave, either for the individual or for the cause.  Both the individual and the cause can often be better served by Prudence than by her big brother Courage.  When, however, the conditions require courage in any form, such as willingness to accept responsibility, the man in charge of the situation at the moment must use courage, or—­fail.  In such cases the decision rests with the man himself.  He cannot shift it to another’s shoulders, even if he would.  Even if he decides and acts on the advice of others, the responsibility remains with him.

From the Top Down, or from the Bottom Up?—­There are two directions in which to approach the subject of training the personnel—­from the top down, and from the bottom up.  The latter is the easier way; is it the better?

The latter is the easier way, because it is quicker and requires less knowledge.  In training a turret crew in this way, for instance, one does not have to consider much outside of the turret itself.  The ammunition can be sent up and down, and the guns can be loaded, pointed, and fired with just as much quickness and accuracy as is humanly practicable, without much reference to the ship itself, the fleet, or the navy.  In fact, knowledge of outside requirements hinders in some ways rather than advances training of this kind.  Knowledge, for instance, of the requirements of actual battle is a distinct brake on many of the activities of mere target practice.

But while it is easier to train in this way all the various bodies of men that must be trained, it is obvious that by training them wholly without reference to the requirements of the fleet as a whole, the best result that we could expect would be a number of bodies of men, each body well trained as a unit, but the combined units not trained at all as component elements of the whole.  The result would be a little like what one would expect from the efforts of an orchestra at playing a selection which the whole orchestra had never played before together, but of which each member of the orchestra had previously learned his part, and played it according to his own ideas, without consulting the orchestra leader.

By approaching the subject from the other direction, however, that is, from the top, the training of each organization within the fleet is arranged with reference to the work of the fleet as a whole, the various features of the drills of each organization being indicated by the conditions developed by that work.  If this plan be carried out, a longer time will be required to drill the various bodies of men; but when it has been accomplished, those bodies will be drilled, not only as separate bodies, but as sympathetic elements of the whole.