Mr. E. J. Reed, formerly Chief Constructor of the Navy,
has pointed out in a long letter to Wednesday's Times how utterly ineffectual Mr. Ward Hunt's new proposals are for giving a higher status and a better income to the Engineers in her Majesty's Navy. Mr. Reed says that if the pay of the chief engineers of such ships as the Thunderer' and the Inflexible' had been doubled, the engineers would still have been underpaid, as compared with a good number of the navigating officers. Instead of this, the chief engineer of the Thunderer' gets an increase of about one-seventh, and the chief engineer of the 'Inflexible' of less than one-tenth. Again the new proposal makes no difference between engineer officers in ships every manoeuvre of which depends on the engi- neer's competence, for its success, and in ships where the engines form a eemparatively small part of the apparatus of the ships. Again, the engineers are not made " executive officers " of the ships, and the change leaves them, therefore, in a definitely lower caste. On the whole, Mr. Reed completely sustains our impres- sion that Mr. Ward Hunt's proposal is of that grudging and =meaning kind which recognises the evil to be cured, but makes no adequate attempt to cure it.
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