THE STOSCH ERA 31

It is good for them to have specialized in some work and to know what it means and the sum total of mental and physical labour that it contains; but their own line should diverge from the technical.1 Specialization became more and more dangerous to the navy. So much the more do I consider Stosch's educational system, which aimed at an all-round training, to be correct.

Among Stosch's efforts to establish a similarity with the army, he instituted a Naval Staff Course, and extended the Naval Staff which he had created, actually giving it a badge of its own on the lines of the " qualification stripe" of the General Staff. In the navy, however, one must not remain long ashore or else one forgets one's seamanship. Moreover the navy's active service is much more varied than that of the army. The General Staff permeates the whole army like a vitalizing nerve-cord, as a second safeguard side by side with the hierarchy of the commanders, as an assistant reporter for the commanders, and depending with them upon the personal connection between the Corps Staff and the great General Staff. Such a second nerve-system is inconceivable in the navy. The holding together of great masses,

1 Apropos, I mention here the principle introduced by Lord Fisher in England of standardizing the officers' corps so that the gentleman who had been trained to engineering could serve just as well on the bridge. The British naval attache in 191.3 gave as the reason for this so-callecl Selborne system the desire to weaken the advancing democratic influence of the trade unions in the engine-room by giving it a military point. This system does not imply any military progress.