Hard luck pursues the American Navy. It is the common butt, not only of political mountebanks, but also of all the brummagem uplifters and soul-snatchers who now sweat to save us. If a Mr. Secretary Denby is not permitting the Falls and Dohenys to raid its goods, a Mr. Secretary Wilbur or Josephus Daniels is trying to convert it into a Methodist Sunday-school. Worse, the Navy gets more than its fair share of the national dirty work. It is told off to put down free speech in the Virgin Islands, and it is delegated to flog, hang and butcher the poor Haitians, and so convert them into black Iowans, with money in the bank. Elsewhere in the world such disagreeable jobs are given to the Army. The British Army, for example, performs all the massacres that are necessary in India, and the French Army attends to whatever routine murders and mayhems are called for in Syria and Morocco. But the American custom puts all such Christian endeavor upon the Navy. However, unless my agents lie, it is not the gore that revolts the more high-toned naval officers, but the new rectitude that has been thrust upon them. They are, as a class, excellent fellows, and full of pride in their uniform. As officers, they are all theoretically gentlemen, and many of them are so in fact. They have traveled widely, and are familiar with the usages of the civilized world. They know what is decent and seemly. Well, try to imagine how they must feel when they read the daily papers. One day they read that the Secretary of the Navy has ordered a group of their colleagues to prosecute a woman nurse for bringing in a couple of jugs aboard a naval collier. The next day they observe that a high officer in the Marines has filled the newspapers with a meticulous and indignant account of what went on at a table where he was a guest, in the house of one of his subordinates. Explanations of this last episode have been offered, but they certainly do not explain it away. The essential and immovable point is that one officer snitched on another, his host--that the immemorial and invariable obligations of a guest were sacrificed to Law Enforcement. What would happen to an English naval officer who made any such assault upon the code? What, indeed would happen to an honest Elk?