IV WHO PROVIDES WHAT 247 



for a nation to play with. The pohit for us is 

 that battleships have brothers, sons, and friends, 

 husbands and fathers, aboard them; that they are 

 wet ships, happy ships, or proper sad. On merry 

 evenings we sing: 



'They may build the ships, my boys, 



And think they know the game, 

 But they can't build the boys of the bulldog breed 



That made Old England's name!' 



And we mean it, both then and at times when 

 we should laugh at the blatancy of the song; for 

 to us, they stands for more than foreign nations; 

 it stands for our own Admiralty as well. They 

 build the ships without which there could be no 

 Navy. We provide the men, the living flesh and 

 blood, without which their ships would be so 

 much misshapen scrap-iron. Brains and material 

 and money, all In plenty, go to the making of 

 their ships. God knows how much more has gone 

 to the making of those who man them ! 



'They there Navy chaps. . . .' The phrase 

 denotes a difference that really exists. They form 

 within the nation another nation with its own 

 traditions, customs, manner of growth, habits of 

 thought, and Its own internal politics, about which 

 the outer world hears next to nothing until a brief 



