THE NAVY AND THE ADMIRALTY.

THE eager discussion on the condition of the navy (or, to state the question with greater exactness), whether or not it is a fact that we have a navy adequate to our wants, has been prolonged for a very considerable time without leaving a clear and definite conviction on the public mind as to how this question should be answered.

It is not, I am convinced, necessary to go over the ground on which, confessedly, we have all taken our stand. Nothing need be added to enforce the universal admission, that no country in the world, at any period of its existence, had so much wealth afloat on the seas, or heaped up upon its shores in every quarter of the globe, as our own. It will, I fear, be less generally admitted that, in spite of all its errors, follies, shortcomings, faults, and even crimes, the existence of the British Empire is to us a glory, and to humanity a boon. Its destruction would indeed be the extinguishing of a brilliant light, the overthrow of a striking landmark in the progressive path of mankind. Be that as it may, we need no other reasons than the natural geography which has made such an empire as ours possible to accept the position that a powerful, a supreme navy is the right arm of its defence and of its maintenance. Every statesman in the country, from the extreme economist such as Mr. Cobden to the so-called ultra-Jingo, meets upon this common ground-'We must have a navy;' and the contest only begins when we come to ask, Is the navy we have adequate to our wants?

I must say, before entering upon this disputed point, that any war save a defensive one is abhorrent to my mind. Almost equally repulsive to me is the thought of adding to the heavy burden already resting upon us in the shape of taxation. But it is evident that we must have a navy, and that an inefficient navy represents simply so much hardly earned money whirled into an unfathomable gulf. It is only by producing and maintaining a navy adequate to our wantsin other words, an efficient navy-that we can justify any expenditure upon it at all, and it is inevitable that without a large expenditure we cannot have such a navy. The first point which the public should understand and thoroughly master, before it can be satisfied as to the adequacy or inadequacy of our navy, is, that a number of ships do not constitute a fleet, and that two or three fleets are not a navy.

They are essential and component parts of a navy, but they are far from being the whole. A large number of steam and armoured ships wants a whole flotilla of companions and tenders for its action, and it requires for its maintenance and for its efficiency, docks, coals, and harbours provided with defensive means. It must have these scattered, as are its duties, in all parts of the world, and of these requirements, without which such a navy as ours cannot exist, the public hears but little, for little has been done to provide them. On these details, however, will depend its power of national defence, the protection of our commerce, and the safety of our possessions. The subject requires a far larger grasp, and a more comprehensive view of all its bearings, than can be given in the pages of this Review. Those who have paid any attention to it stand aghast at the negligence and procrastination which have been shown in its treatment and consideration. I now turn to many who are content to look upon a navy as a mere aggregation of ships, and believe that all other things are matters of secondary importance, sure to be properly dealt with sooner or later by the several departments to which they belong; whose great anxiety is to know chiefly, how we stand with France as to the number and quality of our ships of war-France being rightly considered the next great maritime Power to ourselves. I must say it is not easy to treat this subject briefly and yet thoroughly, to give such details as will prove, but not overlay, the case, and to cause the truth to shine out of the heaps of contradictory facts, figures, suppositions, and conclusions with which it has been overclouded.

It would be as natural as it would be agreeable to solve this problem by accepting without question the assurances of public and responsible administrators, by adopting their figures, and by accepting their conclusions as oracles of fate. Unfortunately, there is a thorough and universal distrust of the utterances of public men. Whether or no that distrust, that absolute want of confidence in every statement they make, be well or ill founded, it exists, notwithstanding that their position is one that ought to give their assurances absolute authority.

Now much of this distrust can be traced to the manner in which their statements are drawn up. The very latest official expositions of the numbers of the two ironclad fleets as affording a means of comparison of their power are incomplete and inaccurate. There is a large number of ironclads in the navy lists of both countries-upwards of sixty in number-from which large deductions, we all know, must be made to obtain the relative fighting strength which it is desired to compare ; and until we know what deductions are made by the officials on each side, and the reasons for making them, each of us outsiders can only speak doubtfully and with hesitation even of the numerical force that can be relied on. To some of us it appears evident, that if the English forty-six ironclads-according to one

account, forty-four according to another-officially given as the total non-obsolete ships we possess, do not include ships building and those not complete, many ships that ought to be struck off from under the heading given in the Parliamentary return are unduly and misleadingly retained.' If, again, these ships have been struck off, and the list includes ships building and now completing, the number of French ships is not correctly given, those building and completing being omitted. We have no common ground to stand on; the deductions from both lists must be made arbitrarily, and the conclusions aimed at will be of uncertain value. This information has not been given us.

There is, however, a simple way of dealing with the subject, and it has been used with considerable effect on various occasions. It is this. Take the aggregate number of the ships of the rival navies, and opposite that, place the aggregate displacement of the navies to be compared. Wherever lies the largest figures, there is the superiority! In this case it will be found enormously on the side of England!

Of all the delusions practised on a bewildered public this method is the most deceptive, and, not wishing to use a harsher term, it is the most illogical. Of course no comparison can be called by the name which does not take into account the armament, armour, speed, handiness, coal endurance, and sea-going qualities of the ships. These questions, though they are all-important in giving the value of ships as fighting machines, belong to experts, and cannot be thoroughly discussed in the pages of this Review.

I may illustrate my meaning of the valueless nature of the comparison made in this way, by saying: a certain commodity-national security we will call it has to be purchased. A and B are rivals and competitors for the article. A possesses say sixty coins, B say forty, and not only does the aggregate number but the aggregate weight of A's coins greatly exceeds that of B's. Is A therefore justified in believing that with his sixty coins he can outbid B, and purchase the commodity he requires over B's head? Will not the first question be, What is the value of your sixty coins? May it not be, that forty coins weighing much less than sixty coins have intrinsically greater value, and therefore greater purchasing power? It almost seems childish to state such truisms, yet it is a fact that such reasoning, advanced in sentences somewhat hazily indistinct, is served up to the public. There cannot be anything more absolutely fallacious than a comparison of such very heterogeneous ships as those which compose the fleets of France and England resting on numbers and displacement only. As the value of each coin, and not its number and weight alone, can measure the purchasing power respectively of A and B, so the worth of each ironclad in the respective navies must be

1 Abstract of both the Fighting and Sea-going Divisions of the British NavyArmoured Ships.

taken in conjunction with their aggregate number, before a fair comparison can be made of their relative fighting powers. By neglecting the things necessary to a fair comparison, it would seem that persons whose official positions compel them to become optimists, and who adopt what is called a broad system of classification, arrived at a statement that England had a superiority of fifteen ships non-obsolete, or of sixteen according to another authority.

It is evidently not desirable to make this article too technical, but I may just refer to other points bearing on what we need to arrive at a fair comparison.

The displacement tonnage of a ship is exactly equal to her whole weight at a given draught of water; and I shall use the word tonnage in that sense in the little I have to say about it. If we suppose a ship of 300 feet long to be cut into sections (across her length) thirty feet long, each of those slices, so to call them, will represent a portion of the tonnage of the ship, and when the tonnage of the ten slices is added together the result will be the total tonnage of the ship, of which each slice is a certain amount. It may be granted that the total amount of the tonnage of an armoured ship is one item amongst several in estimating the value of such a ship, should they be ships of somewhat similar armament, &c., but it is very questionable whether the total tonnage of two armoured ships, one armour-plated as in the French system along the whole length of her water-line, the other, as in the modern English system, armoured only along one third of her length, can be compared at all; or, if compared, whether the amount of tonnage armoured should not be considered as confined to that portion (or to those slices of the ship) armoured at the water-line. If so, the total tonnage of the French ship would be reckoned up against about one third of the total tonnage of the English ships, and according to that reasoning the aggregate tonnage of the French ships would be enormously in excess of that of the English. Therefore, according to the Admiralty contention on this subject already referred to, the French Navy would be enormously superior to ours. So much may be said here about tonnage. I may refer those who desire to follow the subject further to a most admirable lecture given by Sir Edward J. Reed, at the Royal United Service Institution, where this subject was lucidly explained, and illustrated, by one of the great masters in the science of naval architecture.

I cannot pass over, without serious mention, the very doubtful, because wholly unproved, system of armour-plating involved in the modern system adopted by our naval constructors. I mean the armoured citadel, combined with the unarmoured ends, of which we have so many examples. As far as could be done without introducing too many technical details, the subject was incidentally discussed in the pages of this Review with reference to the Inflexible (see vol. iii. pp. 278-295).

I only now wish to say that two very important recommendations made by the committee, whose report I then analysed, have been entirely disregarded. And those who are to fight our battles in these ships will do so with a knowledge that their safety depends, not on the capacity of the armour-plated citadel to float the whole ship and preserve her stability, though relying on this statement made by authority-Parliament sanctioned its construction; the ship was afterwards completed in disregard of the understanding thus entered into -but on certain wholly untried systems of water-tight decks, cells, cork, coal storage, and stores, which may or may not supply the buoyancy deficient in the citadel, when its unarmoured ends are riddled and destroyed by shot and shell. I know naval officers, from the Admiral of the Fleet downwards, by whose side I would be proud to stand in any straits, or, if I were younger, whose lead I would follow through any difficulties--men of thoughtful experience and in the full maturity of their faculties both of mind and body—who look upon these ships with dismay; knowing that they would probably have to command them, and risk the honour of the flag in a ship whose existence under fire rests on untried hypotheses. What they ask is, that a trial may be made of this cellular system of defence as it is actually applied to our modern ships. They ask that such a test shall be applied to this system as will give them the same knowledge of its qualities under fire as they now possess of the behaviour of armour plates, or as their forefathers had with respect to wooden ships. A demand like this ought not to be inconsiderately thrust aside on account of its cost. Should the system when thus tried prove a failure, what an immense saving of money and of national honour would ensue! Should it prove triumphantly successful, it would enable naval officers without distrust and without suspicion to take, as they are ever ready to do, their lives and their reputations in their hands, in confidence that the weapons they were using would not betray them. Our naval superiority or our commanding position, whichever they choose to call it, would then have some basis to rest on.

The value that may attach to the strong opinions of a large body of naval officers is much augmented of late by the remarkable development of their scientific education. On the value of fighting ships their opinions have been formed both by study and experience. The former has been aided by valuable lectures and prize essays given by the United Service Institution, by papers read at the Institute of Naval Architects, by the means of study afforded at the Royal Naval College, and by some training in artillery subjects and in the use of torpedoes. There is, however, a strong feeling that much greater facilities for acquiring every kind of experience than exist now might be afforded them with advantage.

To refer to the armaments of our ships is about the most unsatisfactory task a man could possibly undertake. He has to go over a