The writer attributes the efficiency of the crews and the good health they enjoyed even in the West Indies, while under the command of Rodney and Hood, to this more humane and intelligent system. He claims that there were cases when out of twenty-two sail of the line cruising together, there were not twenty-two men who could not come to quarters. The reader who compares this with the terrible ravages made by fever and scurvy in the naval expeditions of Queen Anne’s reign and the beginning of the Seven Years’ War will see how vast had been the change for the better. The example of Captain Cook and the exertions of Rodney’s doctor, Gilbert Blane, brought about improvements in the diet of the men which saved thousands for the service of their country, who would have been thrown to the sharks in former times. All this reform was the spontaneous work of the navy. There was so little about it of Admiralty system that no universal system of quartering men and dividing work was established till far into the nineteenth century. Captains followed the practice of the officers under whom they had first served, with improvements of their own. The perfected discipline of the navy was the result of the labours of hundreds of officers, many of whom are completely forgotten, thinking, experimenting, and toiling, each in his own sphere, but all with the same noble love of good work. Therefore it had, and has, a grand life of its own, incomparably higher, and far more enduring than the mechanical order enforced by a minister or king. “It is the service” was the most emphatic praise a naval officer could give, and “It is not the service” his most severe condemnation. “The Service” was the formula standing for that combination of smartness, of cleanliness, of precision of movement, of exactness of stroke, of resolution to endure, and of intrepidity to venture, which is the glory of the navy, its strength, and the real explanation of its triumphs. It is of this too that the nation has the best reason to be proud. There is something rather servile and more than rather blind in the habit of attributing all success to the commander. In the long run the Roman Legion will wear down Hannibal, and it is a greater feat for any people to produce the organism which is animated by the virtue of tens of thousands of its sons, than the exceptional leader, whose genius does not always last even for the whole of his own life. We do well to put up monuments to Nelson, and it would be to our honour to remember other admirals more fully than we do. The navy itself is the living memorial raised to the generation of forgotten men whose names have passed into forgetfulness, but whose work lives to this day on the quarter-decks and forecastles of every ship flying the cross of St. George.