, and men were needed to operate
and care for the propelling mechanism, they were naturally drawn
from the ranks of mechanics who were employed in the works to
construct it. Stokers were enlisted, in a similar way, from those
working on land-boilers. Here, then, were two new classes of
seamen, corresponding very largely to the officers and sailors of a
sailing-ship. To the unbiassed judgment, it went without saying that
the engineer on watch would take rank with the navigating officer on
watch; but the old school of mariners, the school whose ideas of
progress are crystallised for all time in the historic report of
certain Admiralty Lords that "steam power would never be of any
practical use in Her Majesty's Navy," thought differently. In their
opinion, the engineer was the same as a stoker, and from that day
almost to this the deck-officer who served his time in a sailing-ship
secretly regards the engineers of his steamer as upstarts more or
less, whose position and pay are a gross encroachment upon his own
more ancient privileges.

A little consideration will show that there was some reason for
this feeling in the beginning. In the case of the Royal Navy, the
aggravation was particularly acute. The deck-officers, then as now,
were sons of gentlemen, were members of an ancient and honourable
service, a service included among that select quaternity, to be
outside of which was to be a nonentity--the Navy, the Army, the
Church, and the Bar. The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his
hands, wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable meshwork of
red tape, service codes, and High Toryism. He had his own peculiar
notions of studying a profession, looked askance at the new-fangled
method of driving a ship, honestly thinking, with Ruskin, that a
"floating kettle" was a direct contravention of the laws of God.
Imagine, then, the aristocratic consternation of these honourable
gentlemen when the care and maintenance of propelling machinery,
auxiliary mechanism, and also guns and gun-mountings, were gradually
transferred to a body of men of low social extraction, uncultured and
unpolished land-lubbers and civilians! Only within the last twenty
years have naval engineer officers, now drawn from the same social
strata as the navigating officers, won official recognition of their
importance in the _personnel_ of a ship.

In the case of the engineers of the Mercantile Marine the struggle has
been the same, though by no m