ad no end about it, and yet I am a useless
outsider. All I've been able to do is to potter about in small boats;
but it's all been _wasted_ till this chance came. I'm afraid you'll
not understand how I feel about it; but at last, for once in a way, I
see a chance of being useful.'

'There ought to be chances for chaps like you,' I said, 'without the
accident of a job such as this.'

'Oh, as long as I get it, what matter? But I know what you mean.
There must be hundreds of chaps like me--I know a good many
myself--who know our coasts like a book--shoals, creeks, tides,
rocks; there's nothing in it, it's only practice. They ought to make
some use of us as a naval reserve. They tried to once, but it fizzled
out, and nobody really cares. And what's the result? Using every man
of what reserves we've got, there's about enough to man the fleet on
a war footing, and no more. They've tinkered with fishermen, and
merchant sailors, and yachting hands, but everyone of them ought to
be got hold of; and the colonies, too. Is there the ghost of a doubt
that if war broke out there'd be wild appeals for volunteers, aimless
cadging, hurry, confusion, waste? My own idea is that we ought to go
much further, and train every able-bodied man for a couple of years
as a sailor. Army? Oh, I suppose you'd have to give them the choice.
Not that I know or care much about the Army, though to listen to
people talk you'd think it really mattered as the Navy matters. We're
a maritime nation--we've grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose
command of it we starve. We're unique in that way, just as our huge
empire, only linked by the sea, is unique. And yet, read Brassey,
Dilke, and those "Naval Annuals", and see what mountains of apathy
and conceit have had to be tackled. It's not the people's fault.
We've been safe so long, and grown so rich, that we've forgotten what
we owe it to. But there's no excuse for those blockheads of
statesmen, as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as
they are. They have to go to an American to learn their A B C, and
it's only when kicked and punched by civilian agitators, a mere
handful of men who get sneered at for their pains, that they wake up,
do some work, point proudly to it, and go to sleep again, till they
get another kick. By Jove! we want a man like this Kaiser, who
doesn't wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country,
and sees ahead.'

'We're improving, aren't we?'

'Oh, of cour