I greatly enjoyed years ago overhearing a lady describe to another lady, when crossing over to Ryde, a passing Ryde passenger steamer (just built and differing very greatly from the one we were on board of) as a Battleship. And she wasn’t far out as to what a battleship should be. The enterprise of the Ryde Steam Packet Company had just produced that vessel, which went just as fast astern as she did ahead. In fact, she had no stern. There was a bow at each end and a rudder at each end and screws at each end; so they never had any bother to turn round. Now when you go to Boulogne or Folkestone, I don’t know how much time you don’t waste fooling around to go in stern first, so as to be able to come out the right way; and having escaped sea-sickness so far, I myself have found that the last straw. Let us hope every ship now built after this Chapter will be a “Double-Ender.” But in this world you are a lunatic if you go too fast. Take now the submarines. They began by diving head first to get below water; and in the beginning some stuck their noses in the mud and never came up again, and in the shallow waters of the North Sea this limited the dimension of the submarine. But now there’s no more diving. A lunatic hit by accident on the idea of sinking the ship horizontally; so there is no more bother about the metricentric problems, and all the vagaries of Stabilities. No limit to size! This sort of consideration brought into one’s mind that a great “Education” was wanted; and that we wanted “Machinery Education,” both with officers and men; and also that the education should be the education of common sense. My full idea of Osborne was, alas! emasculated by the schoolmasters of the Nation; but it is yet going to spread. As sure as I am now dictating to you, the practical way of teaching is “_Explanation, followed by Execution_.” Have a lecture on Optics in the morning: make a telescope in the afternoon. Tell the boys in the morning about the mariner’s compass and the use of the chart; and in the afternoon go out and navigate a Ship. Similarly, with the selection of boys for the Navy, I didn’t want any examination whatsoever, except the boy and his parents being “vetted,” and then an interview with the boy to examine his personality (his _soul_, in fact); and not to have an article in the Navy stuffed by patent cramming schoolmasters like a Strasburg goose. A goose’s liver is not the desideratum in the candidate. The desideratum was: could we put into him the four attributes of Nelson:-- I. Self reliance. (If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will.) II. Fearlessness of Responsibility. (If you shiver on the brink you’ll catch cold, and possibly not take the plunge.) III. Fertility of Resource. (If the traces break, don’t give it up, get some string.) IV. Power of initiative. (Disobey orders.) AIRCRAFT.