Admiral Fisher cut the Gordian knot in his own fashion. In substance his Scheme provided that future engineer officers were to be drawn from the same class as deck-officers--to gild the pill, marine officers were flung into the same melting pot. He might have done better: but far more conceivably harm might have been perpetrated. As an argument behind him, he had Drake and Elizabethan conditions, the history of the days when every man was made to “sail his ship and fight it too.” The U.S. Navy had already plunged on a somewhat similar experiment. When the Russo-Japanese War came, the Japanese, in the middle of a life-and-death fight, suddenly granted executive rank to their engineer officers--_i.e._, that right to control and punish their own men which British marine officers have always had. The Scheme met its first rock in the Marines. For three hundred years or thereabouts the “Sea Regiment” has been afloat as a thing apart. The “leather-necks”--as the sailors call them--have built up their own traditions. They have ever remained a force apart from both Army and Navy, belonging to both and yet to neither. The record of the Marines is such that when, recently, it was proposed that they should have a regimental colour with their battles emblazoned on it, the idea had to be abandoned because there was not room on the flag for their services! Any attempt to interfere with the continuity of such a corps was fore-doomed to failure from the first. The Marines resisted being turned into sailors just as they would have resisted being turned into soldiers. They stood out uncompromisingly for being “the Sea Regiment.” The expected happened. By 1911 this part of the New Scheme was practically shelved, and the most unique body of men in the world was left to carry out its own traditions. [Illustration: _Photo_] [_Russell & Sons, Southsea._ ADMIRAL SIR JOHN JELLICOE.] In the matter of future engineers, snags were struck likewise, but here a more or less unreasoning conservatism on the part of parents played its full part. The average parent objected to his son becoming an engineer specialist over old-time reasons. A further and weightier objection was, and continues to be, raised by engineering experts, who argue that engineering is a life profession, not to be picked up efficiently by casual specialization. The matter is still under discussion, and its verification or otherwise rests with the future. As to the first point, a serious effort to overcome it was made early in 1912 by the promulgation of an order that New Scheme officers, specialised for engineering, would be eligible for the command of submarines equally with deck-officers. The importance of this particular point is great; for by the end of 1911 it was generally believed that the motor warship would at some more or less early date in the future replace the steam-driven one; and so the “sail-his-ship-and-fight-it-too” theory found a new interpretation.