and you hit the enemy every round for the simple reason that your guns reached him when his could not reach you. Q.E.D. as Euclid says. What these splendid armour bearers say is “Give me a strong ship which no silly ass of a Captain can hurt.” Of course this implies that if it’s Buggins’s turn to be Captain of a ship he gets it; it’s his turn, even if he is a silly ass. The phase of mind they have is this: “None of your highly strung racehorses for me, give me a good old cart-horse!” So we build huge costly warships which will last a hundred years, but become obsolete in five. It all really is very funny--if it wasn’t disastrous and ruinous! And they are such a motley crew, these discontented ones who come together in John Bright’s cave of Adullam; and the Poor Dear Public read an interview in a newspaper with some Commander Knowall; and then a magazine article by Admiral Retrograde; and some old “cup of tea” writes to _The Times_ (wonderful paper _The Times_--“Equal Opportunity for All”) and there you are! Lord Fisher is a damned fool; and if he isn’t a damned fool he’s a maniac. Oh! very well then, if he isn’t a maniac, then he’s a traitor. Wasn’t Sir Julian Corbett very seriously asked if he (Sir John Fisher) hadn’t sold his country to Germany? Sir Julian thought the report was exaggerated, and that satisfied the Searcher after Truth. But I ask my listeners, however should we get on without these people? How dull life would be without their dialectical subtleties and “reasoned statements” (I think they call them) and “considered judgments”! My splendid dear old friend, who could hardly write his name, the Chief Engineer of the first ironclad, the “Warrior,” told me, when I was Gunnery Lieutenant of her in 1861, that he had arranged for his monument at death being of “malleable” iron. No cast iron for him, he said! It played you such pranks. So it is with these carbonised cranks who wield the pen, actuated by the wrong kind of grey matter of their brain, and, their tongues acidulated with lies, sway listening Senates and control our wars. It requires a Mr. Disraeli to deal with these victims of their own verbosity, who are the facile dupes of their vacuous imaginations and the servile copyists of the Billingsgatean line of argument! CHAPTER VIII NAVAL WAR STAFF AND ADMIRALTY CLERKS “A wise old owl lived in an oak; The more he heard, the less he spoke; The less he spoke, the more he heard; Why can’t we be like that wise old bird?”