CHAPTER III.
LORD FISHER _"Look for a tough wedge for a tough log."_ PUBLIUS SYRUS.
No man I have met ever gave me so authentic a feeling of originality as this dare-devil of genius, this pirate of public life, who more than any other Englishman saved British democracy from a Prussian domination.
It is possible to regard him as a very simple soul mastered by one tremendous purpose and by that purpose exalted to a most valid greatness.

If this purpose be kept steadily in mind, one may indeed see in Lord Fisher something quite childlike.

At any rate it is only when the overmastering purpose is forgotten that he can be seen with the eyes of his enemies, that is to say as a monster, a scoundrel, and an imbecile.
He was asked on one occasion if he had been a little unscrupulous in getting his way at the Admiralty.

He replied that if his own brother had got in front of him when he was trying to do something for England he would have knocked that brother down and walked over his body.
Here is a man, let us be quite certain, of a most unusual force, a man conscious in himself of powers greater than the kindest could discern in his contemporaries, a man possessed by a daemon of inspiration.
Fortunately for England this daemon drove him in one single direction: he sought the safety, honour, and glory of Great Britain.

If his contemporaries had been travelling whole-heartedly in the same direction I have no doubt that he might have figured in the annals of the Admiralty as something of a saint.