Immediately prayers were over he rose from a seat on one of the cross-benches. He said:—
“With your Lordships’ permission, I desire to make a personal statement. When our country is in great jeopardy, as she now is, it is not the time to tarnish great reputations, to asperse the dead, and to discover our supposed weaknesses to the enemy; so I shall not discuss the Dardanelles Reports—I shall await the end of the war, when all the truth can be made known.”
CHAPTER VII
THE ESSENTIALS OF SEA FIGHTING
Sir William Allan, M.P., with the torso of a Hercules and the voice of a bull and the affectionate heart of Mary Magdalene, did not know Latin, and he asked me what my motto meant:
“Fiat justitia—ruat cœlum.”
I had sent it to him when he was malignantly attacking me because, as Controller of the Navy, I had introduced the water-tube boiler. Sir William Allan was himself a boiler-maker, and he had to scrap most of his plant because of this new type of boiler.
I said the translation was: “Do right, and damn the odds.”
This motto has stood me in good stead, for by attending to it I fought a great battle in a righteous cause with Lord Salisbury, when he was Prime Minister, and conquered. I have related this elsewhere. Years after, Lord Salisbury, in remembrance of this, recalled me from being Commander-in-Chief in America to be British delegate at the First Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899, and from thence I went as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.
While I was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, from 1899 to 1902, when I became Second Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I arranged to have lectures for the officers of the Fleet. I extract now from the notes of my lectures some points which may be of general interest, as illustrating the new strategy and tactics necessitated by the change from wind to steam.
After setting forth a few of the problems which would have to be solved in sea-fighting under the new conditions, the lecturer went on to elaborate the themes from such rough notes as I give here of the principal ideas.