Читать книгу Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas онлайн

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Maury then turned to the question of material and devoted a great deal of attention to the graft and inefficiency connected with the building and repairing of ships. “Honorable legislators”, he wrote, “are warned that the evils are deeply seated in the system itself, and are not to be removed by merely the plucking of a leaf, or the lopping off of a limb: the axe must be laid at the root—for nothing short of thorough and complete reorganization will do”. His attack was directed particularly against the Board of Navy Commissioners; and when this board attempted a reply, he answered with the most devastating article of the whole series, in which he piled up figures, and multiplied instances of graft and ruinous waste. As a summary, he wrote, “Vessels are built at twice the sum they ought to cost—they are repaired at twice as much as it takes to build—the labor to repair costs three times as much as the labor to construct—the same articles for one ship cost four or five times as much as their duplicates for another—it costs twice as much to repair ordnance and stores for a ship as it takes to buy them”. Maury advocated in place of this board a bureau system with divided responsibility. The Secretary of the Navy, he thought, should have an assistant under-secretary, who should be a post captain in the navy and have general oversight over the various bureaus. Then promotions would be taken out of politics, and the old saying that “a cruise of a few months in Washington tells more than a three years’ cruise at sea in an officer’s favor” would lose its significance.