Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXL BATTLE RECORD OF THE MONITORS. Evils of the Navy Bureau System.?Two Largo Monitors Ordered.?The Dictator and the Puritan.-?Poverty of the Government.?Pecuniary Embarrassments.?Application to Congress for Relief.?Interference with Ericsson’s Work.?Handsome Acknowledgments of his Services.?The Monitors under Fire.?Attempts to Capture Charleston.?Dramatic Episodes of War. AT the time of our great civil war the s'avy suffered, as it suffered before, and as it still suffers in lesser measure, from what is known as the
Bureau System. It is an ingenious device for giving to incapacity, indifference, and stupidity the solemn sanction of official utterance; for reducing the pace of the swiftest to that of the slowest?the zeal, intelligence, and energy of the ablest to the capacity of the most sluggish in comprehension and the most inert in-action. The building, equipping, and manning of naval vessels is entrusted to half a do/en independent bureau chiefs, a single incompetent or sluggish officer may thwart the most zealous efforts of his associates, and the plan of naval selection by survival, without regard to fitness, influences the choice of bureau officers, their appointment being usually limited to those who have grown old in the service, but not necessarily wise. The presence in the Navy Department of ilr. Fox, who had broken away from the influence of routine and tradition, served in a measure to correct the evils of a vicious system, but only in a measure. If he proposed, he must of necessity leave others to execute, and the result was delay and inaction where the circumstances imperatively demanded the utmost energy in performance. It was on June 18,1862, as we have seen, that Ericsson was informed by Mr. Fox that the Department had resolved to build two…