of Christian evangelisation, one of the great dynamic movements in the history of mankind, the Apostles refused to leave the work of preaching in order to 'minister to tables'; and again, in the human body, which is the archetype of functional co-ordination, the automatic, unconscious, and what may be called the 'routine' processes of the body, such as the movements of the heart and lungs, are controlled by one portion of the brain, while the conscious, or what may be called the 'operational,' activities, such as walking and speaking, are directed by another.

It may appear at first sight that this principle would naturally commend itself to all administrators, but experience shows that this is far from being the case; men brought up in a small sphere of business, where they have been accustomed to exercise a large measure of direct and personal control, cling to a system of centralisation, and cling to it the more tenaciously the older they grow. They take a real delight in detail and in the exercise of personal supervision over every branch of work, and are never assailed by the desire to be free in order to think of things unthought of, or to study the wider aspects of their work. All the currents of the 19th-century Navy tended in this direction. The naval officer was brought up in a limited sphere of work; his education gave him a strong sense of personal responsibility; and his promotion was gained by personal attention to the paint and brass work of his ship. As a commander or a captain he learnt to love to pry into all the corners of the ship; as an admiral he still hankered after detail, and was apt to be absurdly busy and preoccupied over all sorts of trifles. He was maximus in minimis-very great in very little things. Sir Percy Scott has pointed out how the admiral of the 19th century decided what clothes the men were to wear, what boats each ship was to use, whether awnings were to be spread, when and how washed clothes were to be hung up, and how insistently each ship had to follow the flagship motions, and to do exactly what the flagship did.*

This tendency to centralisation became an ineradicable

'Fifty Years of Naval Life,' 144, 198, 212. 'As regards housemaiding and tailoring, no inspection could have been more searching.'

trait of most flag-officers; and the average Commanderin-Chief lost himself in a morass of detail. Nor was this tendency confined to the British Navy. Moltke has pointed out that the Austrian staff orders in 1866 were not bad orders, but had one insuperable defect; they went into enormous detail, and reached the Army Commanders only after the battle had been fought.† The same fault characterised our staff work in South Africa. The German official account, commenting on the Spion Kop operation orders, says: The above orders are typical of English methods; they contain a mass of detail which could be perfectly well left to junior officers.' Similarly, in the Russo-Japanese war, the orders issued by the Great Headquarter Staff dealt with a vast mass of local administrative detail. Kuropatkin states that 'the amount of writing done by the various staff officers was colossal; they worked the whole evening and all night; their effusions were lithographed and sent off in all directions, but they were rarely received by the troops in proper time.' At the battle of Telissu the operation orders never even reached the First East Siberian Division, and the battle was one long string of blunders from beginning to end. Compare this with Moltke's system. The order of Aug. 21, 1870, directing the movements of more than 200,000 men for the next four days, did not fill one printed page.

Brevity and despatch are the life of war; and brevity and despatch are only possible if all extraneous effort has been eliminated from the controlling centre by the adoption of some vital principle of distinction, such as exists between operations and supply, that is, between the science of the use of the weapon and the science of its maintenance in an efficient state. Curiously enough, this very distinction, which is now one of the recognised principles of staff organisation, is to be found in the system of naval organisation established by Henry VIII in 1546, which held sway in our Navy down to 1832. It is true that the analogy must not be pressed too closely,

'I never omitted to analyse all shootings personally.' Bacon's 'Dover Patrol,' i, 93.

+ It is lengthy documents which make the Austrians so slow.' Kraft, Letters on Strategy' (1898), vol. II, 133.

German official account, trans. Colonel H. Du Cane, 139.

for the circumstances of the time were different, but it is there, and is plainly discernible. In Henry VIII's organisation the Lord High Admiral represented the function of general control, while the actual administration was performed by the four Principal Officers, namely, the Treasurer, Comptroller, Surveyor, and Clerk of the Acts, who were responsible respectively for finance, the general supervision of accounts, the building and upkeep of ships, and the record of naval business. These officials were known as the Navy Board. Another official acted as President of the Board, under the title of Lieutenant of the Admiralty.*

The offices of Lord High Admiral and of the Navy Board were sometimes in commission,t but this fact serves to distinguish the two separate functions all the more clearly. The supply system was doubtless often bad and insufficient-sometimes deplorably so; but its insufficiency seems to have been due rather to the inevitable limitations of the time than to any inherent defect of principle. There can be little doubt that the old conception attached to the office of the Lord High Admiral was that of general direction and command, and that the work of supply-victualling, equipment, pay, clothing-was kept separate from it. All our old wars were fought under this dual organisation, in which the Admiralty was responsible for the general direction, and the Navy Office for the maintenance and provision of all the multifarious requirements of war. It was under this system that Hawke and Nelson fought; and it was this system, in a modified form, which was finally adopted by Sir Eric Geddes and Lord Jellicoe in 1917 as the result of experience gained in the recent war.

In 1832, when the memory of the French wars was beginning to fade, Sir James Graham merged the Admiralty

This officer would have been in general charge of all administrative or maintenance' functions; and the retention of the office might have served to remedy many of the subsequent defects in the system, but it fell into abeyance.

The functions of the Principal Officers, for instance, were performed by Commissioners from February 1619 to February 1628. The office of the Lord High Admiral was in commission from September 1628 to March 1638. The Principal Officers were again replaced by Navy Commissioners at the outbreak of the Civil War by an ordinance of Sept. 15, 1642, and these Commissioners continued till the Restoration. Nine Commissioners of the Admiralty were similarly appointed by both Houses on Oct. 19, 1642.

and the Navy Board into one on the plea of economy and efficiency—a plea which seemed sound enough, and was made more plausible by the unsatisfactory working of the supply services. This amalgamation was regarded as a master-stroke, but its real nature was not discerned. The Admiralty congratulated itself on swallowing up the Navy Board, but the work of the Navy Board swallowed up the real functions of the Admiralty. The successors of St Vincent became slaves of the lamp of administration and supply; and, to use a lowly analogy, the mistress of the house, because the range was out of order, installed herself in the kitchen to supervise the cook. The consequence can be traced in the naval literature of the 19th century, which is almost barren of any contribution to the science of naval war. The naval officer became more and more immersed in the business of peace administration; and the effect of the change was enormously accentuated as technical services multiplied.

Progress and development in the technical branches of naval knowledge had hitherto been relatively slow, but the advent of the steam engine, and what may be called the hydro-carbon era of industry, altered the whole aspect of affairs. Marine engineering thrust masts and yards into the background; ships and ordnance underwent an enormous change; technical crafts multiplied; the sciences of gunnery, torpedoes, hydraulics, electricity, and wireless telegraphy grew up almost in a night, and became transformed in a single decade. The naval officer of the past had aimed only at being a seaman. He now became imbued with the idea that it was his business to be a master of every craft practised on board a ship. The brains and talent of the service were mortgaged to the schools of gunnery and torpedoes †

* The faulty functioning of the supply services is remedied by reforming the supply services. If the Quartermaster General is inefficient, he must be replaced by one who is efficient. To make the Chief of the Staff do his work may remedy the evil, but it only introduces another-Who is going to do the work of the Chief of the Staff?

It is interesting to observe the casual way in which electrical engineering became an adjunct of the torpedo branch. The first torpedo was towed, and fired by electricity when in contact with the enemy. Hence torpedoes became associated with electricity; and, as electrical science developed, the whole electrical service of the ship became an adjunct of the torpedo officer, though the torpedo itself is driven by compressed air, and quite independently of electricity. But, while the torpedo officer was

-schools very necessary in themselves, but representing only the technical branches of naval warfare. In this world of change and new fields of study there were, however, two factors which did not change. One was human capacity, the other was time. The brain could hold only a certain amount; the day was still only twenty-four hours long. The result was inevitable. The study of strategy and of staff work, which is the business aspect of war, was ignored, while navigation and hydrography, which are the handmaids of strategy and the real technical crafts of the sea, became the 'Cinderella' branches of the service, and for years were regarded with something like contempt.

Here again, if the evolution of these new technical branches be studied, the same neglect to distinguish between the use of the instrument and its construction and maintenance will be found retarding progress and development. From 1870 to 1900 the gunnery lieutenant concerned himself much more with the gun than with gunnery; and the gunnery that existed prior to the era of Sir Percy Scott was a mere exercise entirely divorced from reality, while the name of tactics was given to certain quadrille movements, useful enough perhaps as an exercise in handling ships, but with no earthly relationship to gunfire or to the actual movements of a fleet in battle. In the same way, the torpedo lieutenant spent his time in taking torpedoes to bits* and putting them together again, and had none left for the study of their use and tactical control in action.

The gunnery reform initiated by Sir Percy Scott about 1897 marked the genesis of a new era. In Lord Fisher, a kinetic man, eruptive and disruptive, there glowed an instinct for reform; but, though a big man, he lacked perspective, and was a man of action, indisposed to study a subject deeply and exhaustively. His early training had wedded him to a system of centralisation; and he was strongly opposed to the idea of staff organisation. There was something to be said for this view, for it may

worrying over a fault in the dynamo, he was neglecting the study of torpedo tactics and control.

Not only the torpedo lieutenant. It is narrated of a distinguished Admiral of the Fleet that as a captain he would spend a spare forenoon in stripping and assembling a torpedo.