igencies,
stimulating a demand that the navy, in types and numbers, should be
kept abreast of the times. In most pursuits of life American
intelligence has been persistently apt and quick in search of
improvement; but, while such characteristics have not been absent from
the naval service, they have been confined chiefly, and naturally, to
the men engaged in the profession, and have lacked the outside support
which immediate felt needs impart to movements in business or
politics. Few men in civil life could have given an immediate reply to
the question, Why do we need a navy? Besides, although the American
people are aggressive, combative, even warlike, they are the reverse
of military; out of sympathy with military tone and feeling.
Consequently, the appearance of professional pride, the insistence
upon the absolute necessity for professional training, which in the
physician, lawyer, engineer, or other civil occupation is accepted as
not only becoming, but conducive to uplifting the profession as a
whole, is felt in the military man to be the obtrusion of an alien
temperament, easily stigmatized as the arrogance of professional
conceit and exclusiveness. The wise traditional jealousy of any
invasion of the civil power by the military has no doubt played some
part in this; but a healthy vigilance is one thing, and morbid
distrust another. Morbid distrust and unreasoned prepossession were
responsible for the feebleness of the navy in 1812, and these feelings
long survived. An adverse atmosphere was created, with results
unfortunate to the nation, so far as the navy was important to
national welfare or national progress.

Indeed, between the day of my entrance into the service, fifty years
ago, and the present, nowhere is change more notable than in the
matter of atmosphere; of the national attitude towards the navy and
comprehension of its office. Then it was accepted without much
question as part of the necessary lumber that every adequately
organized maritime state carried, along with the rest of a national
establishment. Of what use it was, or might be, few cared much to
inquire. There was not sufficient interest even to dispute the
necessity of its existence; although, it is true, as late as 1875 an
old-time Jeffersonian Democrat repeated to me with conviction the
master's dictum, that the navy was a useless appendage; a statement
which its work in the War of Secession, as well on the Confederate as
on the Union si