ide your fit men,--fit by their familiarity not only
with special instruments, but with a manner of life,--and your
mobilization is reduced to a slip of paper telling each one where he
is to go. He will get there.

That a navy, especially a large navy, can be kept fully manned in
peace--manned up to the requirements of war--must be dismissed as
impracticable. If greatly superior to a probable enemy, it will be
unnecessary; if more nearly equal, then the aim can only be to be
superior in the number of men immediately available, and fit according
to the standard of fitness here generalized. The place of a reserve in
any system of preparation for war must be admitted, because
inevitable. The question, of the proportion and character of the
reserve, relatively to the active force of peace, is the crux of the
matter. This is essentially the question between long-service and
short-service systems. With long service the reserves will be fewer,
and for the first few years of retirement much more efficient, for
they have acquired, not knowledge only, but a habit of life. With
short service, more men are shoved through the mill of the
training-school. Consequently they pass more rapidly into the reserve,
are less efficient when they get there, and lose more rapidly, because
they have acquired less thoroughly; on the other hand, they will be
decidedly more numerous, on paper at least, than the entire trained
force of a long-service system. The pessimists on either side will
expound the dangers--the one, of short numbers; the others, of
inadequate training.

Long service must be logically the desire, and the result, of
voluntary systems of recruiting the strength of a military force.
Where enrolment is a matter of individual choice, there is a better
chance of entrance resulting in the adoption of the life as a calling
to be followed; and this disposition can be encouraged by the offering
of suitable inducements. Where service is compulsory, that fact alone
tends to make it abhorrent, and voluntary persistence, after time has
been served, rare. But, on the other hand, as the necessity for
numbers in war is as real as the necessity of fitness, a body where
long service and small reserves obtain should in peace be more
numerous than one where the reserves are larger. To long service and
small reserves a large standing force is the natural corollary. It may
be added that it is more consonant to the necessities of warfare, and
more