Sir Edward J. Reed

“ No doubt, when the size or cost of a particular ship is limited, the designer has to make a choice of evils, but where people are as free as is the British Board of Admiralty to build safe and efficient ships, the devotion of so much armor as the Nelson and Northampton carry to so limited a measure of protection is a very singular proceeding, and illustrates once more with how little wisdom the world is governed. ”

“ There are even in England itself men who cannot or will not see this danger, and who impute to those who strive to avert it ambitious, selfish, and even sordid motives. But it is to no unworthy cause that England’s naval anxieties are due. We have no desire for war; we do not hunger for further naval fame; we cherish no mean rivalry of other powers who seek to colonize or to otherwise improve their trade; we do not want the mastery of the seas for any commercial objects that are exclusively our own. ”

“ The characteristic development of the Italian navy has been the abandonment of side-armor as a protection to stability, and the attempt to obtain high speed and great coal endurance. This bold departure in the matter of armor is due mainly to the fact that Italy’s sea policy is governed by conditions which appeal nowhere else with equal force. “It is the combination of a large army and a powerful fleet,” writes Sir Charles Dilke, “which really makes Italy formidable; for if Italy has only the fifth army it has the third navy of all the powers. ”

“ If any one should be disposed to ask why this requirement—which is obviously an extreme one, and an impossible one for more than a single power—is more necessary for England than for any other country, the answer must be, Circumspice! To look round over England’s empire is to see why her failure on the sea would be her failure altogether. France, Germany, Italy, and even Holland, might each get along fairly well, losing nothing that is absolutely essential to their existence, even if every port belonging to them were sealed by an enemy’s squadron. ”

“ In referring to the navy of the past, it is impossible to avoid recalling the feeling of pride with which an American seaman—officer or man—walked the deck of his ship. This feeling was common to the naval and commercial marine. Our wooden ships that sailed the ocean from 1840 to 1860 were the finest in the world. The old frigate Congress in 1842 was the noblest specimen of the frigates of the day, and the sloop-of-war Portsmouth was unsurpassed as a corvette. The clipper ships of that period need no eulogy beyond their own record. ”

“ America has contributed to modern warfare many of its most valuable inventions. In the decade of 1850-60 the steam frigates of the Merrimac class revolutionized the naval constructions of the world, and became the models for the war-ships of the great maritime powers. In the same period our coast defences reached the high-water mark of modern development, and, soon to be crystallized, there were seething in the brains of American inventors ideas of guns, ships, and projectiles which made history. ”

“ On not immoderate dimensions, at not immoderate cost, ships might be built, still practically invulnerable to gun, ram, and torpedo alike, ships which could dispose of the Admiral class of ships more quickly and certainly than she could dispose of the feeblest antagonist that she is likely to encounter. But in order to produce such ships we must revive the now abandoned principle that armor, and armor alone can save from destruction those ships whose business it is to drive our future enemies from the European seas and lock them up in their own ports. ”

“ Clever German officers may write their ‘Great Naval War of 1888,’ and describe the destruction of the British fleet by the French torpedo-boats, but on the whole we are not ill-satisfied with the naval progress that has been made in the last three years. There is plenty of room for doubt as to whether we get full value for our money; but at all events our navy is undoubtedly and by universal admission the first navy in the world, and relatively to the French we appear to show of ships built and building a number proportionate to our expenditure. ”

“ Indeed, there are services upon which it is necessary to employ armed ships, but which do not demand the use of armored or protected vessels. Unarmored vessels, with some of their more vital contents protected, suffice for such services. Moreover, even where it would be very desirable indeed to have the hull protected by armor to a sufficient extent to preserve the ship’s buoyancy and stability from ready destruction by gun-fire, it is often impracticable to give the ship that protection. ”

“ Submarine mines may be countermined; when necessary, defied; guns may [252] be silenced and torpedo-boats so riddled by rapid-fire guns that they will be disabled beyond the radius of their effective action; automatic torpedoes may be checked by netting, or by the prompt manœuvrings of the attacked vessel; ship may always fight ship. But what is the chance for brain or brawn against a successful submarine boat, when the mere suspicion of its presence is enough in itself to break down the blithest, bravest heart of oak. It is here that their moral effects are enormous. ”

“ It seems not improbable, therefore, that the dangerous system of exposing two-thirds of the ship’s length to destruction from all kinds and every system of naval guns, even the smallest, which prevailed in the British navy for more than twelve years, and which has now happily been superseded in the powerful new ships Nile and Trafalgar, obtained but little more than momentary approval in France, and is likely to have led to the condemnation of the only two ships in which it was attempted—a result which is creditable alike to French science and to French sagacity. ”

“ The idea of the Italian ministers clearly was to give weaker ships no time for long engagements with them, but to pounce upon them by means of enormous speed, and to destroy them at a blow by means of their all-powerful ordnance. They might well expect to have with such ships so great a command over the conditions under which they would give battle as to be well able to repair in time, and at least temporarily, such dangerous wounds as they might receive. ”

“ There was, there is, there ever will be, but one sound policy for a nation that desires to command the seas, and can afford to do so, and that is to reject all doubtful fads, all dangerous fancies, and to insure without ceasing pronounced superiority in every known and measurable element of naval power. New inventions will and must be made; new sources of power, new means of attack, will and must be discovered ”

“ They show clearly that if we would have a navy fitted to carry on war, we must give some recognition to officers on the ground of merit, either by the advancement of the best, or, what amounts to nearly the same thing, by the elimination of the least deserving; that we must give them a real training for war in modern ships and with modern weapons; that the direction of the naval establishment, in so far as it has naval direction, must be given unity of purpose, and the purpose to which it must be directed is fighting efficiency ”

“ England, for example, has always guarded her homes, not at the hearth-stone nor the threshold, but within gunshot of her enemy’s territory; her defence has been an attack upon his inner line, and her vessels have been, not corsairs preying upon merchantmen, but battle-ships, ready for duel or for fleet engagement, whether they had the odds against them or not. ”

“ The country has been wonderfully favored with peace at home and abroad, and no urgent call to arms has roused the nation to prepare for war. The rapidity with which a large fleet of cruising ships for blockading purposes was extemporized during our civil war has left a hurtful impression on the public mind that in an emergency a similar effort might prove equally efficacious—disregarding altogether the difference in circumstances of contending with an enemy possessed of a naval force and with one possessed of none. ”

“ Before presenting the types of cruisers which are now to be introduced into the navy, it may be well to refer to an error that exists, or has existed, in the popular mind as to the signification of a steel cruiser. To many who are uninformed in technical language the word steel, in connection with a vessel of war, implies protecting armor, and such misapprehension would convey the idea that a cruiser of steel is able to contend with an armored vessel. This is a mistake; there is protection obtained by constructing a vessel of steel, but not such as is provided by armor. ”

“ I must not be thought, however, to admit, for one single instant, that our navy should give us no anxiety. As long as France remains at peace, and spends upon her navy such enormous sums as she has been spending during the last few years, she will be sufficiently near to us in naval power to make our position somewhat doubtful; make it depend, that is, upon how the different new inventions may turn out in time of war. ”

“ If a ship is not intended to close with an enemy, or to fight her anyhow and anywhere on the open sea—which certainly has been the dominant idea of the British navy, in so far as its great line-of-battle ships are concerned—if, for example, a combination of immense speed with [70] one or two extremely powerful and well-protected guns should serve a particular object better than a slower and more fully protected ship would serve it—then even great destructibility in the ship itself may justifiably be incurred. ”

“ They accepted this fallacy as a fact, they made this phrase a fetich, and with a fatuous hope believed it could, by some occult inspiration, in the event of sudden, sharp, and short war, save them from the fighting-machines which twenty years of tireless experiment had perfected abroad. In the end, by a neatly balanced policy of pride and folly, the Navy was exhausted almost to dissolution. Then Congress lazily bestirred itself to action, and prescribed as a remedy three unarmored cruisers and a despatch-boat. ”

“ Even if armor were given up by other powers, it would be a matter for careful consideration in England whether enough of it for the protection of their existence against contemporary guns should not be retained in her principal ships. England’s ability to live as a nation and as the head of an empire is dependent upon her naval superiority, and no price to purchase that can be too great for her to pay. But with Italy the case was and is wholly different. She could not compete with England in naval power, and would not wish to if she could, for she is without an ocean empire to preserve. ”

“ Russia, indeed, spends more upon her navy than does Italy; but Russia probably does not get her money’s worth. Italy at the present moment, in addition to the two splendid ships which she has at sea, is building or equipping eight first-class sea-going iron-clads as against seven being built by France and eleven by ourselves, and she certainly seems to have, as regards the material of her fleet, achieved remarkable results at a low rate of cost. ”

“ Any one who will contrast the British navy of to-day with the British navy as it might and would have been under the administration, say, of such a First Lord of the Admiralty as the present Duke of Somerset proved himself in every department of the naval service five-and-twenty years ago, will understand the recent outcry in England for a safer and more powerful fleet. ”

“ What we desire to do is to keep the seas open thoroughfares to our vast possessions and dependencies, and free to that commercial communication which has become indispensable to our existence as an empire. To accomplish that object we must, at any cost, be strong, supremely strong, in European waters; and it is for this reason that England’s line-of-battle ships ought to be always above suspicion both in number and in quality. ”

“ But for general naval service, and in every case in which a ship is intended to accept battle with a powerful antagonist and fight it out, or to force an action when she encounters such an enemy, it cannot be wise to leave her so exposed that that enemy may almost certainly sink her or cause her to capsize by merely pouring any kind of shot or shell into her unarmored parts. ”

“ To man our ships in time of war three means are open: voluntary enlistment, draft or impressment, or employment of men enrolled in a naval reserve. It would be unreasonable to depend altogether upon the loyal and unselfish patriotism of necessitous men serving before the mast, and there is a chance that mere enthusiasm would not induce a seaman to join the navy if employment was being offered elsewhere at increasing rates of pay. Impressment under any name is unpopular. In its common form it is illegal, and the draft is ever a last resort and always a dangerous measure. ”