Nor have the officers and men been forgotten. The men have had a quarter of a million sterling practically added to their pay; one item alone is £75,000 a year for increase of pensions to petty officers, and another £47,000 a year in giving them their food allowance when on leave, and other similar and just concessions make up the balance. Further improvements in the position of the lower deck are now under consideration and will shortly be ready for announcement, _i.e._, Ratings Committee. The officers, again, no longer pay for the bands out of their own pockets, and the system of Nucleus Crews gives them an amount of Home Service combined with sea-time, with all its domestic advantages, beyond anything ever before obtaining in the Navy. Again, it is recognised by all but a few misguided misanthropes that the new shipbuilding policy is a magnificent departure in fighting policy. _We ask the officers who are going to fight, what they want, and we build thereto._ Formerly vessels were simply belated improvements on their predecessors. Admirals had to make the best use they could of the heterogeneous assemblage of vessels which the idiosyncrasies of talented designers and Controllers of the Navy had saddled us with, to the embarrassment of those whose business it was to use them in battle, and to the bitter bewilderment of types in the brain of the Board of Admiralty! Theory was entirely divorced from practice, with the lamentable result that when the two were recently brought together, and the “Dreadnought” was evolved, it was found that the whole Navy had practically become obsolete! “First catch your hare” is the recipe in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book for “jugged hare,” and so speed has been put in the forefront in every class of vessel from battleship to submarine, and as it’s no use having the speed without the wherewithal to demolish the enemy, the armament of our new ships, as so fully exemplified in the “Dreadnought,” has received such a development that that vessel is equal to any two and a half battleships at present existing. The efficacy of the Nucleus Crew system has also been obvious to the whole Fleet in the unprecedented exemptions from machinery defects, and the unexampled gunnery efficiency, coupled with a saving of about 50 per cent. in repairs of ships, which incidentally has led in a large measure to the reduction of 6,000 Dockyard workmen. _And it must never be forgotten that every penny not spent in a fighting ship or on a fighting man is a penny taken away from the day of battle!_