There is a huge difference between political merit and official merit. Political merit relates entirely to party service, and may constitute demerit when squared with the generally accepted moral code and standard of human behavior. A Secretary of the Army or a Secretary of the Navy may, by previous training, ignorance, effeminacy, or, even worse, by pacific bias, be entirely unsuited to such a position and entirely incapable of broadly perceiving militant duty.
Such changing of our war and naval secretaries is as harmful as it would be to change the head of a hospital every month, with the same disregard of qualifications derived from previous education, training, and experience. Evidently, it would be disastrous to place in supreme command of a hospital first an allopath, then change him a month later for a homeopath, replace the homeopath with an osteopath, followed by a Christian Science healer, then a spiritualistic clairvoyant, finally a Hindoo swami. Such a rotation of hospital heads would hit the patients pretty hard.
When, however, we get a Secretary of the Navy of the caliber of Theodore Roosevelt, or of ex-Secretary Meyer, then the Navy profits by having a civilian for its head, because such men as these, who are natural judges and masters of men, are able to make use of the greater knowledge and experience of those under them, and they have the additional advantage of being en rapport with the civilian's point of view, while from the fact that they are civilians, they escape the unreasoning prejudice of the anti-militarists, who believe that all naval and military men are actuated by ulterior motives and self-interest when trying to get Congressional support for the Army and Navy.
A man who, through study and experience, has become a specialist in a certain line of work, is better qualified to do work in that line and to know its needs than is a person who has had no such knowledge and no such experience. In legal matters, we go to a lawyer to get advice, and we generally take it, and pay for it. There is an old saw that he who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client.
The American Congress is composed almost entirely of civilians, who are qualified neither by study nor experience to pass judgment on the needs of our Army and Navy. They are as unable correctly to diagnose the condition of our Navy and to prescribe rational remedies as a pastry cook would be to diagnose and operate for appendicitis, or to prescribe for the treatment of pneumonia.
It is hard to understand how there could be any one in the country unable to perceive this patent truth—that a person educated and trained to a thing all his life ought to know more about that thing than a person who has had no such training and no such experience.
Yet the officers of the Army and Navy are not permitted to give public expression to their views on naval and military needs.
I quote from the New York Times the following remarks on a significant incident:
"Washington, Feb. 17, 1915.—Secretary Garrison to-day instructed Brigadier-General Scott, chief of staff of the army, to call upon Captain William Mitchell, of the general staff, to explain published remarks attributed to him on the unpreparedness of the United States for war.