Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1887 — United States Naval Officers. [ARTICLE]

United States Naval Officers.

It has been the fashion in certain quarters to abase the personnel of the navy,, and to represent it as & horde of idlers serving no useful purpose and feeding at the public crib, the older members holding comfortable billets, where their only duty is to draw their monthly pay, and the younger engaged in pleasure trips in foreign countries, or hanging about Washington, where their time is taken up with various forms of social frivolity. For one who knows them as they really are, it is hard to find words to characterize with sufficient forcs and indignation the grossness and malignity of these caricatures. As a matter of fact, the officers of the navy, to-day, form a body of patient, hard-working, earnest men, of singular resource and adaptability, eager and efficient in the performance of duty. Their life is a trying one, and the difficulties with which they must contend are unknown in ordinary civil occupations. A large part of the officer’s career is passed under the closest restraints of military discipline. The ordinary wear and tear of professional service tells upon the mind and body to an extent far greater than in other walks of life. The intercourse of home, the vie d’interieur, which forms the balance-wheel of so many overworked human machines, is, at best, broken, fitful, interrupted. On board the ship at sea, where the physical horizon is unobstructed, tbe mental horizon is narrowed down to companionship foi* three years with a dozen or a score of men in'tlie same profession, penetrated with the same ideas, absorbed in the same occupations, surrounded and cramped by the same routine. The officer may have his books, but the conditions of ship-life are unfavorable to study. He visits other countries, but he cannot reap the benefits that come from foreign travel; he is tied to the ship, he skims the coast and puts in at the seaports, he is always confined by the limitations of the cruise. If he goes on leave, after the binding restraints of ship life, what he needs and must have is relaxation, pure and simple. It is a rare man who would get much else from such short and infrequent holidays. In his service afloat, which fills the larger part of his career, especially the first half of it, he is cut off' from that general and broadening intercourse with men in other occupations, that stimulating, metropolitan atmosphere, that eternal movement of thought and of affairs which rubs away the sharp edges of prejudice and tradition, and which makes the great centers of activity, in .whatever direction —intellectual, artistic, commercial—the only places In which a man can acquire breadth of view and mental vigor—in which he can meublr l’esprit, as the French say—in this nineteenth century.— Professor J. B. Solej, United States Navy, in Scribner's Magazine.