st use courage, or--fail. In such cases the decision rests
with the man himself. He cannot shift it to another's shoulders,
even if he would. Even if he decides and acts on the advice of
others, the responsibility remains with him.

_From the Top Down, or from the Bottom Up?_--There are two directions
in which to approach the subject of training the personnel--from
the top down, and from the bottom up. The latter is the easier
way; is it the better?

The latter is the easier way, because it is quicker and requires
less knowledge. In training a turret crew in this way, for instance,
one does not have to consider much outside of the turret itself.
The ammunition can be sent up and down, and the guns can be loaded,
pointed, and fired with just as much quickness and accuracy as is
humanly practicable, without much reference to the ship itself,
the fleet, or the navy. In fact, knowledge of outside requirements
hinders in some ways rather than advances training of this kind.
Knowledge, for instance, of the requirements of actual battle is a
distinct brake on many of the activities of mere target practice.

But while it is easier to train in this way all the various bodies
of men that must be trained, it is obvious that by training them
wholly without reference to the requirements of the fleet as a
whole, the best result that we could expect would be a number of
bodies of men, each body well trained as a unit, but the combined
units not trained at all as component elements of the whole. The
result would be a little like what one would expect from the efforts
of an orchestra at playing a selection which the whole orchestra
had never played before together, but of which each member of the
orchestra had previously learned his part, and played it according
to his own ideas, without consulting the orchestra leader.

By approaching the subject from the other direction, however, that
is, from the top, the training of each organization within the
fleet is arranged with reference to the work of the fleet as a
whole, the various features of the drills of each organization
being indicated by the conditions developed by that work. If this
plan be carried out, a longer time will be required to drill the
various bodies of men; but when it has been accomplished, those bodies
will be drilled, not only as separate bodies, but as sympathetic
elements of the whole.

Of course the desirability of drilling separate divisions of a
fleet, ana