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Show . mm mm Our Oterary Cable, DECADENCE OF AMERICAN NAVY "Decadence of the American Navy" begins the literary lit-erary serial of the July Donohoe's. The author's knowledge is evidently in touch with fact, albeit, the word "decadence" is the opposite of what we were led to believe concerning the American navy. Reading Read-ing along, "decadence" is found to apply not to armor nor any part of war vessels supposed to be formidable, but to the inadequacy of marine training. This evil is supplemented by the many desertions of sailors at the first opportunity. The reason for such denioraliation is given by a writer in the Army and Navy Journal, who says: v . "You want reasons for numerous desertions. Here are some from a member of one of the crews of the defunct European squadron. We left Purope Nov. 30. 1904, to spend the Christmas holidays in the West Indies, In-dies, and then to rendevous Jan. 15. at Culebra. Bar-badoes, Bar-badoes, and St. Kitts, fine places to turn adrift 1.100 men in. Prices were doubled in St. Kitt3 after three days, no beer, no fruit, and precious little to eat. Was there any reason why we could not have stayed at Lisbon, Villefranche, Gibraltar, and left there Jan. -1 for the other place? Here It is alt night coaling by all the ships. Do circumstances require this? No liberty, lib-erty, poor food and plenty of drill out of all reason" and so on. "The navy has been more and more, for the past fifteen years at least, feeling the evil and enervating effects of the decline of our merchant, marine," accord-lug accord-lug to James Connolly, writing for Donohoe's. "The training, discipline, and seamanship of the greater part of the men shipping in the navy have grown proportionately pro-portionately worse with that decline; The merchant ship being . the training ship in which most of such sailors were schooled, this was of course inevitable. Nor it is all the men's fault that they are not better sailors than many of them are now proving to be. You can no more make a sailor of the type required by the service on board of one of our modern fighting machines ma-chines than you can make an expert' acrobat at hod-carrying. hod-carrying. "If not quite to the manner born as in the days of our supremacy on the sea. you still can make sailors as they were made then. Summer cruises around the West Indies or up the Mediterranean, or South Sa Islands, in tine steam training ships with a brass band, a printing press, and a piano on board, may help make fine weather sailors. But if you demand the weathered, seasoned, and salted brand with the iron will, the dogged dog-ged resolution ,the instinctive sense of obedience and respect for his officers, born of the necessity of such action to the saving of his own life, you must adopt a. very different sort of training to that recently in vogue. Besides the article on the navy, the June number of Donohoe's contains the following: Summer Time (poem), L.iie Twigg; "Not a Judgment." Judg-ment." (story, continued), Grace Keon; A Harvest Day in Ireland (Illustrated). Seumas MacManus; OH in Exile, (poem), Seumas MacManus: Rural Route No. 4 (story), Eleanor R. Parker: Aunt Chloe Says (poem). Rev. John H. Dooley; Not on the Programme (story). Lelia Hardin Bugg: The Indian Legend of the Moccasin Mocca-sin Flower, Rev. Edmund Basel: Great Ones of Our Faith'. '(Cure d'Ars), illustrated; Joan of Arc (poem illustrated). il-lustrated). S. L. Emery; Boston's Patron Saint (illustrated). (illus-trated). Lawrence F. Kostka; The Red Man (story), Angus Idal; Longing (poem). Lyndall Charlotte. Burden; Bur-den; The Manager's Misadventure (story), E. M. Lynch; The Stolen Statues (story). Nora Tynan O'Ma-hony; O'Ma-hony; Songs of the Sea (illustrated). Mabel Clifford: Bygone Summer Dnys (illustrated). Denis A. McCarthy: McCar-thy: An Island Feud. Nicholas P. Murphy; People in Print (illustrated); The Philosophy of the Circus' (il-lustraed), (il-lustraed), John Talbot Smith; Book Reviews; Question Box. INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN GERMANY. ' Concluding a series of articles on "Industrial Education Edu-cation in Germany" in the July number of the Catholic "World. J. C. Monaghan, head of the U. S. Consular Service, makes these observations: "Certainly it should not continue to be truly said of our people that their most dangerous weakness is over-confidence, over-confidence, an undue reliance in their own skill, and the iniiate superiority of everything American, and their consequent unwillingness to adapt their goods to the wants of foreign consumers, or make the systematic system-atic effort, which other nations have found necessary, to build up and maintain a prosperous export trade. That this danger really exists does not rest upon the testimony of the German visitors alone. "An eminent English technician who recently visited vis-ited the United States was impressed with the lack of scientific knowledge on the part of foremen and high-class operatives and the indifference on the part of their employers to the latest and highest improvements improve-ments in machinery. The latter portion of this criticism criti-cism is confirmed by various Americans who are engaged en-gaged in supplying new labor-saving machines to Great Britain and Germany, and who find that progressive pro-gressive foreign firms in the metal industries are more enterprising than their American rivals in adopting up-to-date labor-saving equipments of American origin. "Germany and Great Britain afford especially good .markets for American machinery of the best types. Not only this, but the labor conditions abroad seem to favor the use of such perfected machinery. Tnis opens up the latest and most important fact in the whole situation, which Is that the conditions of labor, la-bor, especially , in the metal industries, are rapidly changing have, indeed, changed In England and Germany Ger-many since the great machinists' strike In Great Britain Brit-ain and since the Germans have learned that it Is against America, not Europe, that their Industrial strength must in future be measured." Other contents of Catholic World are: Dublin Castle in 1798, William F. Dennehy; Was Blake a Poet?, Percy Cross Standing; An Ancient Hospitalthe Hos-pitalthe Paris Hotel-Dieu, The Countess de Coursey; Miranda and Juliet, A. W. Corpe; Industrial F.duea-tion F.duea-tion in Germany, J. C. Monaghan; June, Jeanie Drake; The Extrication of Patricia, M. T. Waggaman; Her Ladyship, Katherine Tynan; A Catholic and the Bible Bi-ble VI., Rev. James J. Fox, D. D. ; The Wren, Edward Ed-ward F. Garesche, S. J.; New Books; Foreign Periodicals; Period-icals; Current. Events. |