The Naval Reserve
This brings me to a most important part of the subject, the question of merchant seamen as a reserve for the Navy. There can be no doubt that the institution of the Royal Naval Reserve was a grand idea, but there are grave doubts as to the way in which it is being carried out. As far as its officers are concerned, its success can hardly be disputed, though there may be more truth than is palatable in the assertion that Naval officers look down with much contempt upon the gallant merchantmen who become R.N.R. lieutenants. Whether that be so or not, I am sure that Naval officers would be the first to recognise the value of R.N.R lieutenants if ever their services were needed, and any lingering feeling of superiority would soon give place to admiration. But the men, the rank and file, who are each paid a substantial retaining fee yearly, besides a guinea a week for six weeks’ annual drill? I speak under correction as trenching upon a matter with which I have had small acquaintance, but I believe that drill is usually put in on board of an ancient hulk, with obsolete weapons, and that very few of the men have any acquaintance whatever with the actual conditions of service on board a sea-going vessel of war. If I am right in this contention, then this most valuable body of men are running to waste, and would be no more fit to take their places on board a man-o’-war than they would be to start cabinet-making. And if this be so in the case of Royal Naval Reserve men, what can be said of those outside that experimental force? Except that he would be hardly likely to get seasick, the merchant seaman suddenly transferred to (let us say) a first-class battleship would feel as much out of his element as any landsman, more so than an engine-fitter or a man accustomed to some of our big machine-shops. To use the same words, but in a very different sense, that I used about the tramp-steamer crews, a man-of-warsman (blue-jacket) is not a sailor at all now. He is a marine artilleryman with a fine knowledge of boat handling, but a spanner is fitter for his fist than a marlinspike. He lives in the heart of a bewildering complication of engineering contrivances, to which the mazy web of a sailing-ship’s top hamper is as simple as a child’s box of bricks. He is accustomed to the manipulation of masses of metal so huge as to excite the awe-stricken wonder of the ordinary citizen who is not an engineer. And familiarity with packages of death-dealing explosives renders him as contemptuously indifferent to their potentialities of destruction as if they were sand or sawdust. And, most important of all, long and rigid training has made him one of the smartest men in the world, able to act at the word of command like a pinion in a machine, at the right moment, in the right way, yet with that intelligence no machine can ever possess.