The rapid, splendid expansion of the navy to more than sevenfold its former size brought its own big problems of how to prepare for a very specialized kind of life and duty young men having, as was the case with most of them, no sea tradition in their blood and but little previous interest in the naval affairs of their own country. In Great Britain there are hundreds of families whose names have been represented in the British naval roster, without the break of a single generation, for centuries. The very strength of the tradition draws the sons of these houses into the naval service by an insuperable attraction and from childhood attunes their minds and hearts to preparation for naval life and work. And everywhere in Britain pride in the navy is high and interest in it is keen. No such previous mental attitude of a whole people made easy the problem of expanding the American navy and training its new recruits under the necessity of the highest possible speed. Pride and interest in their navy have always been potential rather than actual and constant among the American people. If it did something, in war or peace, that aroused their sub-conscious feeling about it they were quick and ardent in their response. But through year after year the navy was something as foreign to the daily life and interests of the great mass of people in all that wide extent of inland country wherein lives the majority of the population as were the canals on Mars. Very few of them ever saw a battleship or a destroyer or a naval officer or a bluejacket and only an occasional picture, or newspaper headline, or magazine article reminded them at wide intervals of the American navy’s existence. Under such conditions, the quick response of the country to the navy’s needs was one of the finest and least to be expected of its many achievements. From all over the country, Mid-Western and coastal regions alike, young men began to pour into the naval recruiting stations, and it is well within the truth to say that the majority of them came from homes and from regions in which the navy had hardly been even mentioned or thought about by any one from year’s end to year’s end. Moreover, they were mainly men of old American stock. The navy for this war did not become a fused mass of nationalities, as the army did, but returned to a condition even more thoroughly native-American than it had recently shown. Between ninety and one hundred per cent of the seamen of the enlarged navy were American born. The most of them were of that fine type of young men, educated and intelligent, who become, a little later, of consequence in their communities. In their training the fact that they had had no “sea legs” in their ancestry, or in their own minds and hearts, did not seem to matter in the least. They took to the training and to the life on the sea-washed, rolling decks of destroyers, chasers and other craft as ducks take to water.