The fathers of our country thought it necessary to the security of our government that all naval and military authority should be subordinate to the civil authority. Congress is able absolutely to dominate the Army and Navy. The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy are generally civilian politicians. It certainly does seem inconsistent to take a man out of civil life, who, very likely, may be wholly ignorant of naval and military matters, and, through preconceived prejudice, unalterably opposed to actual naval and military needs, and place him in a position seriously to interfere with the work of the officers who have been educated at government expense at West Point and Annapolis. The Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Navy ought not to be changed, regardless of merit, or the lack of it, every time we change a President. Those important offices should be lifted out of politics. A man's political qualifications for an office usually depend not a whit upon his being suited to the office by his ability to perform the duties of the office, but simply upon what he has done for the party to earn the appointment. There is a huge difference between political merit and official merit. Political merit relates entirely to party service, and may constitute demerit when squared with the generally accepted moral code and standard of human behavior. A Secretary of the Army or a Secretary of the Navy may, by previous training, ignorance, effeminacy, or, even worse, by pacific bias, be entirely unsuited to such a position and entirely incapable of broadly perceiving militant duty. Such changing of our war and naval secretaries is as harmful as it would be to change the head of a hospital every month, with the same disregard of qualifications derived from previous education, training, and experience. Evidently, it would be disastrous to place in supreme command of a hospital first an allopath, then change him a month later for a homeopath, replace the homeopath with an osteopath, followed by a Christian Science healer, then a spiritualistic clairvoyant, finally a Hindoo swami. Such a rotation of hospital heads would hit the patients pretty hard. When, however, we get a Secretary of the Navy of the caliber of Theodore Roosevelt, or of ex-Secretary Meyer, then the Navy profits by having a civilian for its head, because such men as these, who are natural judges and masters of men, are able to make use of the greater knowledge and experience of those under them, and they have the additional advantage of being _en rapport_ with the civilian's point of view, while from the fact that they are civilians, they escape the unreasoning prejudice of the anti-militarists, who believe that all naval and military men are actuated by ulterior motives and self-interest when trying to get Congressional support for the Army and Navy.