Government that is in power, but bad trade and bad government combined
make a terrific burden for any nation to carry.

Service men, in the main, measure and think always from a military or
naval point of view. Some of them have quite a genius for organizing
in matters concerning their different professions. Take the late Lord
Kitchener. In Army matters he was unequalled as an organizer but
abominably traduced. Then there is Lord Fisher, who easily heads
everybody connected with the Navy, as a great Admiral who can never be
deprived of the merit of being the creator of our modern fleet. He
combines with a matchless genius for control a fine organizing brain.
The politician, with his amateurish antics, deprived the British
Empire of the services of an outstanding figure that would have saved
us many lives and many ships, without taking into account the vast
quantity of merchandise and foodstuffs that have perished. It is not
by creating confusion that the best interest of the nation is served,
either in peace-time or during war. Those robust rhetoricians who
massacre level-headed government and substitute a system of make-shift
experiments during a great national crisis do a wicked public
disservice. I have no time to deal with these superior persons in
detail, but I cannot keep my thoughts from the terrible bitterness and
anguish their haphazard experiments may have caused. The destroying
force will eat into the very entrails of our national life if some
powerful resolute personality does not arise to put an end to the
hopeless extemporizing and contempt for sober, solid, orderly
administration. The truth is that, if a government or anything else is
wrongly conceived, natural laws will never help it to right itself,
and it ends in catastrophe. Such governments are inflicted on us from
time to time as a chastisement, it is said, for our national sins, and
the process of disintegration is deadly in its effects. The only