BANQUET. 339 



in the last few years to put back the Engineering Corps of the Navy. Perhaps the people 

 who advanced that proposition did not appreciate what they were doing, but I can tell them 

 that they are doing an iniquitous thing. The reason it was necessary to amalgamate was 

 not that the line officers were going to teach the engineers proper engineering, but it is a 

 fact, gentlemen, that a ship is a unit, and you cannot have two organizations in one ship and 

 work together as a unit. The corps system on the operative side will not make a unit, and 

 we are trying to form a new Engineering Corps in the Navy — those fellows are on the 

 beach, not going to sea. Why? Because they have become commanders, they do not have 

 to go to sea, they lose touch with the engineers they have charge of, and they sit back in 

 Washington and tell us what we can do. 



It is the same old story coming up again, and it will end in putting the Navy back again 

 to the place where the captain goes to the speaking tube and yells an order down. The man 

 down below does not understand the order, so the captain says, "Who is the damn fool at 

 the end of this tube?" and the boy says, "Not at this end, sir." That is what you are com- 

 ing to if you put the new Engineering Corps into efifect in the Navy; we do not need it. 

 There are enough youngsters in the Navy to do the designing work and keep the designing 

 work where it needs to be, and there are enough of you gentlemen in civil life who are per- 

 fectly willing to design anything we want, but ours is an operative proposition, and you 

 cannot operate with two corps on board the ship, attempting to do different things at the 

 same time. 



While at the New York Yard I ran into German shipwork, as some of you may know. 

 I understand that Mr. Anderson told you about it yesterday. There are some things about 

 that German shipwork you ought to know and do not. In the first place, the German ship- 

 work was a distinct illustration of my text, "The rabbit had to climb the tree." These ships 

 were the big part of our transportation facilities. I think, outside of the German ships at 

 that time, we could transport 20,000 men a month, so we had to take them. The esti- 

 mate was that it would take eighteen months to get them ready for sea. That looked all 

 right, but we could not take so long. There were men in Washington who were saying 

 that Europe was done if we could not get men abroad quickly, and that proved to be abso- 

 lutely true. 



In order to get these ships we turned to electric welding. It was a new departure in 

 marine engineering to apply electric welding to cast-iron cylinders the way we did. We 

 started the work. We expected to have some failures. We certainly did not expect to 

 have the wonderful success we did make out of it. I believe that we had more luck than 

 is generally understood, but it did offer a quick solution to a slow problem ; the result was 

 that in five months we had turned out all the ships which were estimated to take eighteen 

 months. The first ship which was finished, on which the estimate was ten months, was 

 turned out in three weeks. You could not get around it. 



During that work we found some very curious things. One of the side issues was that 

 we found $3,000,000 worth of machine tools on a Hoboken pier. We needed machine tools 



