be deemed the ultimate master of the sea.  As in many contests, the decision has gone unqualifiedly to neither; for he who sails the sea and braves its tempests, must be in heart and character a sailor—­and yet he who fights the scientific war-craft of the present day cannot be merely a sailor, like him of the olden kind, but must be what the New York Times, a few years ago, laughingly declared to be a combination quite unthinkable, “a scientific person and a sailor.”

Each year since the fateful 8th of March, 1862, has seen some addition to the fighting machinery of navies.  Some appliances have been developed gradually from their first beginnings, and are to-day substantially what they were at first—­but of course improved; among these are the turret, the automobile torpedo, the telescope-sight, the submarine, and the gyrocompass.  Many other appliances found favor for a while and then, having demonstrated the value of what they attempted and did perform, were gradually supplemented by improved devices, doing the same thing, but in better ways; in this class are many forms of interior-communication apparatus, especially electrical.  Still other appliances are adaptations to ship and naval life of devices used in civil life—­such as the telephone, electric light, and radio.

Each of these appliances has required for its successful use the educating of men to use it, and frequently the creation and organization of entirely new branches of the service; an illustration is the radio corps in each of our large ships.  At the present time the attitude of officers and of the department itself is so much more favorable to new appliances that a clear probability of a new device being valuable is a sufficient stimulus to bring about the education of men to use it; but a very few years ago many devices were lost to us because they were considered “not adapted naval use.”  Now we endeavor to adapt them.

The present complexity of our material is therefore reflected in the complexity of the organization of our personnel; and as it is the demands of material that regulate the kind of personnel, and as a machine must be designed and built before men can learn to use it, it follows that our personnel must lag behind our material—­that our material as material must be better than our personnel as personnel.

It may be answered that all our material is first invented, then designed, and then constructed by men; that men create our material appliances (though not the matter of which they are composed), that the created cannot be better than the creator; and that therefore it is impossible for our material to be better than our personnel.  But to this objection it may be pointed out that only a very small proportion of our personnel are employed in creating; that most of them are engaged merely in using the material with whatever degree of skill they possess, and that, if a man uses an instrument with perfect skill, he then succeeds merely in getting out of that instrument all that there is in it.  A soldier’s musket, for instance, is a very perfect tool—­very accurate, very powerful, very rapid; and no marksman in the world is so skilful that he can shoot the musket with all the accuracy and speed of which the gun itself is capable.