What you want to do is to fight the enemy’s fleet, make him come out from under the shelter of his forts, where his ships are hiding like rabbits in a hole--put in the ferrets and out come the rabbits, or they kill ’em where they are. Nelson blockading Toulon, as he told the Lord Mayor of London in one of his most characteristic letters, didn’t want to keep the French fleet in; he wanted them to come out and fight. But he kept close in for fear they should evade him in darkness or in fog. But the mischief of a Naval War Staff is peculiar to the Navy. I understand it is quite different in the Army--I don’t know. The mischief to the Navy is that the very ablest of our Officers, both young and old, get attracted by the brainy work and by the shore-going appointment. I asked a splendid specimen once whatever made him go in for being a Marine Officer. He said he wanted to be with his wife! Well, it’s natural. I know a case of a Sea Officer whose long absence caused his children not to recognise him when he came home from China and, indeed, they were frightened of him. The land is a shocking bad training ground for the sea. I once heard one bluejacket say to another the reason _he_ believed in the Bible was that in heaven there is “no more sea.” I didn’t realise it at the time, but I looked up “Revelations” and found it was so. A shallower spirit observed: “Britannia rules the waves, but the mistake was she didn’t rule them straight.” A very distinguished soldier who came to see me when I was Port Admiral at Portsmouth said that the Army, as compared with the Navy, was at a great disadvantage. In the Army, or even in the country, he said, anyone who had handled a rifle laid down the law as if he were a General; but the Navy, he said, was “A huge mystery hedged in by sea-sickness.” So far as the Navy is concerned, the tendency of these “Thinking Establishments” on shore is to convert splendid Sea Officers into very indifferent Clerks. The Admiralty is filled with Sea Officers now who ought to be afloat; and the splendid civilian element--incomparable in its talent and in its efficiency--is swamped. Before the war, when I was First Sea Lord, when I left the Admiralty at 8 p.m., prior to some approaching Grand Manœuvres, I left it to my friend Flint, one of the Higher Division Clerks, to mobilize the fleet by a wireless message from the roof of the Admiralty; and the deciding circumstances having arisen, he did it off his own bat at 2 a.m. A weaker vessel, knowing of the telephone at my bedside, might have rung me up; but Flint didn’t. Good old Flint! Always one of the Clerks was on watch, all the year round, night and day; and that obtained in the Admiralty long before any other Department adopted it.