eginnings, and are to-day
substantially what they were at first--but of course improved; among
these are the turret, the automobile torpedo, the telescope-sight,
the submarine, and the gyrocompass. Many other appliances found
favor for a while and then, having demonstrated the value of what
they attempted and did perform, were gradually supplemented by
improved devices, doing the same thing, but in better ways; in
this class are many forms of interior-communication apparatus,
especially electrical. Still other appliances are adaptations to
ship and naval life of devices used in civil life--such as the
telephone, electric light, and radio.

Each of these appliances has required for its successful use the
educating of men to use it, and frequently the creation and organization
of entirely new branches of the service; an illustration is the radio
corps in each of our large ships. At the present time the attitude
of officers and of the department itself is so much more favorable
to new appliances that a clear probability of a new device being
valuable is a sufficient stimulus to bring about the education
of men to use it; but a very few years ago many devices were lost
to us because they were considered "not adapted naval use." Now
we endeavor to adapt them.

The present complexity of our material is therefore reflected in
the complexity of the organization of our personnel; and as it
is the demands of material that regulate the kind of personnel,
and as a machine must be designed and built before men can learn
to use it, it follows that our personnel must lag behind our
material--that our material as material must be better than our
personnel as personnel.

It may be answered that all our material is first invented, then
designed, and then constructed by men; that men create our material
appliances (though not the matter of which they are composed), that
the created cannot be better than the creator; and that therefore
it is impossible for our material to be better than our personnel.
But to this objection it may be pointed out that only a very small
proportion of our personnel are employed in creating; that most
of them are engaged merely in using the material with whatever
degree of skill they possess, and that, if a man uses an instrument
with perfect skill, he then succeeds merely in getting out of that
instrument all that there is in it. A soldier's musket, for instance,
is a very perfect tool--very accurate, ver