A man who, through study and experience, has become a specialist in a certain line of work, is better qualified to do work in that line and to know its needs than is a person who has had no such knowledge and no such experience. In legal matters, we go to a lawyer to get advice, and we generally take it, and pay for it. There is an old saw that he who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. The American Congress is composed almost entirely of civilians, who are qualified neither by study nor experience to pass judgment on the needs of our Army and Navy. They are as unable correctly to diagnose the condition of our Navy and to prescribe rational remedies as a pastry cook would be to diagnose and operate for appendicitis, or to prescribe for the treatment of pneumonia. It is hard to understand how there could be any one in the country unable to perceive this patent truth--that a person educated and trained to a thing all his life ought to know more about that thing than a person who has had no such training and no such experience. Yet the officers of the Army and Navy are not permitted to give public expression to their views on naval and military needs. I quote from the New York _Times_ the following remarks on a significant incident: * * * * * "_Washington, Feb. 17, 1915.--Secretary Garrison to-day instructed Brigadier-General Scott, chief of staff of the army, to call upon Captain William Mitchell, of the general staff, to explain published remarks attributed to him on the unpreparedness of the United States for war._ "_Captain Mitchell was quoted as having said that 'it would take the United States about three years to put an army of one million trained men in the field, and in that time an enemy could take and hold our American seaboards.'_ "_Secretary Garrison said he considered such utterances, if made in public at present, injudicious and improper._" * * * * * When a hunter goes out with a gun after game, he does not consider it good sport to shoot a four-footed beast or flying fowl without first giving the victim a chance for its life, and an opportunity to give the alarm to its fellows; yet our army and navy men, under the present gag rule, are not given a sportsman's chance to escape being shot, through our national unpreparedness, or even to give a cry of warning to their fellows. Even the murderer is given a chance to present his case before being executed, but the American soldier is not afforded any such opportunity. Our Congress allows itself to be dominated by impossible pacific ideas, and consequently neglects to take the necessary sane precautions to safeguard the country against war, or even to avert disaster in case of war, and yet, when there arises a _casus belli_, Congress feels no moral compunction against declaring war and sending its ill-equipped, thin-ranked, ill-provided Army to the front to face inescapable death.