Lord George Hamilton was then First Lord and the Great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury’s brother-in-law was the gentleman at the War Office who was solely responsible for the Navy deficiencies, bar the politicians. When they cut down the total of the Army Estimates, he took it off the Sea Ordnance. He had to, if he wanted to be on speaking terms with his own cloth. I don’t blame him; I expect I should have done the same, more particularly as I believe in a Citizen Army--or, as I have called it elsewhere, a Lord-Lieutenant’s Army. (The clothes were a bit different; but Lord Kitchener’s Army was uncommonly like it.) Lord George Hamilton, having patiently heard me, as he always did, went to Lord Salisbury. Lord George backed me through thick and thin. The result was a Committee--the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, Chairman; W. H. Smith, Secretary for War; Lord George Hamilton, First Lord of the Admiralty; the Director of Ordnance at the War Office, and myself. It was really a very remarkably unpleasant time. I had an awful bad cold--much worse than General Alderson, the Prime Minister’s brother-in-law--and Lord Salisbury never asked after it, while he slobbered over Alderson. I just mention that as a straw indicating which way the wind blew. The result, after immense flagellations administered to the Director of the Sea Ordnance, was that the whole business of the munitions of war for the Navy was turned over to the Admiralty, “lock, stock and gun barrel, bob and sinker,” and by Herculean efforts and the cordial co-operation of Engelbach, C.B., who had fought against me like a tiger, and afterwards helped like an Angel, and of Sir Ralph Knox, the Accountant-General of the Army, a big deficit, in fact a criminal deficit, of munitions for the Fleet was turned over rapidly into a million sterling of surplus. They are nearly all dead and gone now, who worked this enormous transfer, and I hope they are all in Heaven. This story has a lovely sequel; and I forgave Lord Salisbury afterwards for not asking after my cold when, in 1899, many years after, the Hague Peace Conference came along and he submitted my name to Queen Victoria as the Naval Delegate, with the remark that, as I had fought so well against his brother-in-law, there was no doubt I should fight at the Peace Conference. So I did, though it was not for Peace; and M. de Staal, who was a great friend of mine, and who was the President of the Conference, told me that my remarks about boiling the crews of hostile submarines in oil when caught, and so forth, were really unfit for publication. But W. T. Stead tells that story infinitely better than I can. It is in the “Review of Reviews” for February, 1910.