But how does it know that the armour of the turrets is good, or that the guns will fire accurately? Indeed, all that it sees is the shell. The rest must be taken on trust. A navy may look all right and be quite bad. The nation gives a certain amount of money to build ships which are taken in charge by officers and men who, shut off from public observation, may do about as they please. The result rests with their industry and responsibility. If they are true to the character of the nation by and large that is all the nation may expect; if they are better, then the nation has reason to be grateful. Englishmen take more interest in their navy than Americans in theirs. They give it the best that is in them and they expect the best from it in return. Every youngster who hopes to be an officer knows that the navy is no place for idling; every man who enlists knows that he is in for no junket on a pleasure yacht. The British navy, I judged, had a relatively large percentage of the brains and application of England. "It is not so different from what it was for ten years preceding the war," said one of the officers. "We did all the work we could stand then; and whether cruising or lying in harbour, life is almost normal for us to-day." The British fleet was always on a war footing. It must be. Lack of naval preparedness is more dangerous than lack of land preparedness. It is fatal. I know of officers who had had only a week's leave in a year in time of peace; their pay is less than our officers'. Patriotism kept them up to the mark. And another thing: once a sailor, always a sailor, is an old saying; but it has a new application in modern navies. They become fascinated with the very drudgery of ship existence. They like their world, which is their house and their shop. It has the attraction of a world of priestcraft, with them alone understanding the ritual. Their drill at the guns becomes the preparation for the great sport of target practice, which beats any big-game shooting when guns compete with guns, with battle practice greater sport than target practice. Bringing a ship into harbour well, holding her to her place in the formation, roaming over the seas in a destroyer--all means eternal effort at the mastery of material, with the results positively demonstrated. On one of the Dreadnoughts I saw a gun's crew drilling with a dummy six-inch; weight, one hundred pounds. "Isn't that boy pretty young to handle that big shell?" an admiral asked a junior officer. "He doesn't think so," the officer replied. "We haven't anyone who could handle it better. It would break his heart if we changed his position."