To prevent such a condition, therefore, the staff must be kept in touch with the fleet; and it must also permit the fleet to keep in touch with the staff, by arranging that, accompanying the system of training, there shall be a system of education which will insure that the general plan will be understood throughout the fleet; and that the means undertaken to execute it will be made sufficiently clear to enable each person to receive the assistance of his own intelligence.  No man can do his best work in the dark.  Darkness is of itself depressing; while light, if not too intense, stimulates the activities of every living thing.

This does not mean that every mess attendant in the fleet should be put into possession of the war plans of the commander-in-chief, that he should be given any more information than he can assimilate and digest, or than he needs, to do his work the best.  Just how much information to impart, and just how much to withhold are quantitative questions, which can be decided wisely by only those persons who know what their quantitative values are.  This is an important matter, and should be dealt with as such by the staff itself.  To get the maximum work out of every man is the aim of training; to get the maximum work that shall be effective in attaining the end in view, training must be directed by strategy, because strategy alone has a clear knowledge of what is the end in view.

Stimuli.—­Some men are so slothful that exertion of any kind is abhorrent to them; but these men are few, and are very few indeed among a lot of healthy and normal men such as fill a navy.  An office boy, lazy beyond belief in the work he is engaged to do, will go through the most violent exertions at a baseball game; and a darky who prefers a soft resting-place in the shade of an umbrageous tree to laboring in the fields will be stirred to wild enthusiasm by a game of “craps.”

Now why are the office boy and the darky stimulated by these games?  By the elements of competition, chance, and possible danger they bring out and the excitement thereby engendered.  Training, therefore introduces these elements into drills as much as it can.  Competition alone does not suffice, otherwise all men would play chess; competition and chance combined are not enough, or gentlemen would not need the danger of losing money to make card games interesting; but any game that brings in all three elements will rouse the utmost interest and activity of which a man is capable.  Games involving these three elements are known by many names; one name is “poker,” another name is “business,” and another name is “politics.”  There are many other games besides, but the greatest of all is strategy.

Now in the endeavor to prepare a fleet by training, no lack of means for exciting interest will be found; in fact no other training offers so many and so great a variety of means for introducing the elements of competition, chance, and danger.  The problem is how best to employ them.