IT occurs to me that the reputation to which your Chairman alludes was achieved not by doing anything in particular, but by writing stories — telling tales if you like — about things which other men have done. They say in the Navy, I believe, that a man is often influenced throughout the whole of has career by the events of his first commission. The circumstances of my early training happened to throw me among disciplined men of action — men who belonged to one or other of the Indian Services — men who were therefore accustomed to act under orders, and to live under authority, as the good of their Service required.

My business being to write, I wrote about them and their lives. I did not realise, then, what I realised later, that the men who belong to the Services — disciplined men of action, living under authority — constitute a very small portion of our world, and do not attract much of its attention or its interest. I did not realise then that where men of all ranks work together for aims and objects which are not for their own personal advantage, there arises among them a spirit, a tradition, and an unwritten law, which it is not very easy for the world at large to understand, or to sympathise with.

For instance, I belonged then to a Service where the unwritten law was that if you gave a man twice as much work to do in a day as he could do, he would do it; but if you only gave him as much as he could do, he wouldn’t do half of it. This in itself made me sympathise with the tradition of other Services who have the same unwritten law, and with the spirit which underlies every service on land and sea — specially on the Sea.

But as you yourselves know well, Gentlemen, the spirit of the Navy is too old, too varied, and too subtle, to be adequately interpreted by any outsider, no matter how keen his interest, or how deep his affection. He may paint a more or less truthful picture of externals; he may utter faithfully all that has been given him to say, but the essential soul of the machine — the spirit that makes the Service — will, and must, always elude him. How can it well be otherwise? The life out of which this spirit is born has always been a life more lonely, more apart than any life there is. The forces that mould that life have been forces beyond man’s control; the men who live that life do not, as a rule, discuss the risks that they face every day in the execution of their duty, any more than they talk of that immense and final risk which they are preparing themselves to face at the Day of Armageddon. Even if they did, the world would not believe — would not understand.

So the Navy has been as a rule both inarticulate and unfashionable. Till very recently — till just the other day in fact — when a fleet disappeared under the skyline, it went out into empty space — absolute isolation — with no means visible or invisible of communicating with the shore. It is of course different since Marconi came in, but the tradition of the Navy’s aloofness and separation from the tax-payer world at large still remains.

It is not altogether a bad tradition, d’you think? The Navy represents the man at the wheel in our ship of state, and speaking as a tax-payer, the less the passengers, that is the tax-payers, talk to or about the man at the wheel, the better it will be for all aboard the ship.

Isn’t it possible that the very thoroughness with which the Navy has protected the nation in the past may constitute a source of weakness both for the Navy and the nation? We have been safe for so long, and during all these generations have been so fre............