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Page 40
The necessary complement of those admirable measures which have been
employed now for over a decade in the creation of naval material is
the preparation of an adequate force of trained men to use this
material when completed. Take an entirely fresh man: a battleship can
be built and put in commission before he becomes a trained
man-of-war's man, and a torpedo-boat can be built and ready for
service before, to use the old sea phrase, "the hay seed is out of his
hair." Further, in a voluntary service, you cannot keep your trained
men as you can your completed ship or gun. The inevitable inference is
that the standing force must be large, because you can neither create
it hastily nor maintain it by compulsion. Having fixed the amount of
material,--the numbers and character of the fleet,--from this follows
easily the number of men necessary to man it. This aggregate force can
then be distributed, upon some accepted idea, between the standing
navy and the reserve. Without fixing a proportion between the two, the
present writer is convinced that the reserve should be but a small
percentage of the whole, and that in a small navy, as ours,
relatively, long will be, this is doubly imperative; for the smaller
the navy, the greater the need for constant efficiency to act
promptly, and the smaller the expense of maintenance. In fact, where
quantity--number--is small, quality should be all the more high. The
quality of the whole is a question of _personnel_ even more than of
material; and the quality of the _personnel_ can be maintained only by
high individual fitness in the force, undiluted by dependence upon a
large, only partly efficient, reserve element.
"One foot on sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never,"
will not man the fleet. It can be but an imperfect palliative, and can
be absorbed effectually by the main body only in small proportions. It
is in torpedo-boats for coast defence, and in commerce-destroying for
deep-sea warfare, that the true sphere for naval reserves will be
found; for the duties in both cases are comparatively simple, and the
organization can be the same.
Every danger of a military character to which the United States
is exposed can be met best outside her own territory--at sea.
Preparedness for naval war--preparedness against naval attack and for
naval offence--is preparedness for anything that is likely to occur.
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY OUTLOOK.
_May, 1897._
Finality, the close of a life, of a relationship, of an era, even
though this be a purely artificial creation of human arrangement, in
all cases appeals powerfully to the imagination, and especially to
that of a generation self-conscious as ours, a generation which has
coined for itself the phrase _fin de si�cle_ to express its belief,
however superficial and mistaken, that it knows its own exponents and
its own tendencies; that, amid the din of its own progress sounding in
its ears, it knows not only whence it comes but whither it goes. The
nineteenth century is about to die, only to rise again in the
twentieth. Whence did it come? How far has it gone? Whither is it
going?
A full reply to such queries would presume an abridged universal
history of the expiring century such as a magazine article, or series
of articles, could not contemplate for a moment. The scope proposed to
himself by the present writer, itself almost unmanageable within the
necessary limits, looks not to the internal conditions of states, to
those economical and social tendencies which occupy so large a part of
contemporary attention, seeming to many the sole subjects that deserve
attention, and that from the most purely material and fleshly point of
view. Important as these things are, it may be affirmed at least that
they are not everything; and that, great as has been the material
progress of the century, the changes in international relations and
relative importance, not merely in states of the European family, but
among the peoples of the world at large, have been no less striking.
It is from this direction that the writer wishes to approach his
subject, which, if applied to any particular country, might be said to
be that of its external relations; but which, in the broader view that
it will be sought to attain, regards rather the general future of the
world as indicated by movements already begun and in progress, as well
as by tendencies now dimly discernible, which, if not counteracted,
are pregnant of further momentous shifting of the political balances,
profoundly affecting the welfare of mankind.
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