“Well,” he inquired, when his friend returned the paper, “what do you think of it?”
“I understood you to say, Mr. Cramp, that you desire to avoid controversial matter in this paper?”
“Yes.”
“And you would strike out anything that might partake of that nature?”
“Yes.”
“Well, in that case, there would be little left but the title of the paper!”
The fact is, that whenever Mr. Cramp undertook to write or dictate for publication upon professional topics, he was almost instinctively controversial, almost intuitively combative. His long experience and his drastic training enabled him to see through any device within his professional sphere as through a pane of glass, and he could read its shortcomings or its defects as an open book. In such premises, it was never his wont to be sparing. But his criticisms were so uniformly sound, his comments so logical and practical, and his motives so palpably beyond question, that he was seldom combated at all, and never successfully.
In the foregoing chapters we have reproduced extracts from his published papers and correspondence upon purely professional subjects. As the reader has perceived, they involve not only knowledge of everything within the immediate sphere of his own vocation, but also a broad and generous group of the problems of international politics and diplomacy. Mr. Cramp was not merely an adept in the design and construction of ships, he was equally versed in that more subtle array of physical and moral forces which in our day have come to be grouped under the general head of “Sea power;” and his conception of the ultimate international objects to be subserved and wrought out by the ships he built was as clear as his knowledge of the details of their building.
In the domain of general thought, of history, and of ethics, Mr. Cramp was only a little less prolific than in the literature of his own profession. His address to the Netherlands Society on the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century, delivered at the Union League, January 24, 1898; his “Forecast of the Steel Situation,” published January 18, 1900, which events two years later converted into prophecy, and a recent article written for the journal of the Central High School (The Mirror) on the subject of Fakes and Pretenders, introducing as his text the notorious Keely and his “motor,” with many others like them, must be passed over with simple mention. Reproduction of them even by extract or in synopsis could only reinforce the impression, already clear, of the wide diversity of his thought, the vast scope of his observation, the keen thoroughness of his research, and the wonderful assimilative capacity of his mind.