The experience of the American civil war, when the whole vast carrying trade of America passed into our hands, and has never since been recovered by her, tells heavily against the notion that by the utmost exertions we could regain our trade if once it passed out of our keeping.
Schemes have no doubt been devised for enabling our merchant fleets to some extent to protect themselves, by placing a certain number of guns on board a few of the ships. But if the guns we have to supply them with are of inferior power, even this resource fails us. While, therefore, we hail with pleasure the efforts which some of our younger politicians, and Mr Arnold Forster more especially, have made to direct attention to the vital importance of a searching inquiry into the relation which at present exists between our naval strength and the amount of work which it has to do, we cannot but regard this question of our ordnance as one even more vital than that of the numerical adequacy of our armoured ships. It affects all the serious questions with which, apart from that of a successfully accomplished invasion of these islands, we have to deal in considering our national position of security. If our guns are inferior, our home harbours are no longer defensible. If our guns are inferior, the coaling-stations, on which the efficiency alike of our steam navy and of our vast steam mercantile marine depends, neither are, nor can be made within any reasonable period, secure. If our guns are inferior, there is nothing to protect us from that terrible danger on which the eyes of all who look forward a little have long been fixed, – viz., that some fine morning, shortly after the outbreak of war, we shall wake up to hear that a fast-sailing cruiser has seized one of our coaling-stations, filled up her bunkers with all she could carry, set fire to the rest, thus securing herself against pursuit, and passing from station to station, repeating the same operation, has crippled for an indefinite period alike our commerce and our naval action. If our guns are inferior, it is in vain for Sir Thomas Brassey to assure us that the hulks of all our ships taken together displace more water than those of any other Power. The hulks, in such a case, are only the larger target for the superior weapons of an enemy.
All these points which we have discussed are absolutely independent of the vexed question of the nature of the next great naval action, whether guns, or rams, or torpedoes are to be the determining element. Even as to that we may safely say that the most vigorous advocate of rams or of torpedoes would feel an exceeding unwillingness to go into action against a fleet armed with a formidable artillery, unless he had, in addition to his rams and torpedoes, guns of equal power with those of his enemies, if not the mightiest and most manageable that can be provided.
We insist thus earnestly on the importance of this question, because, from the continual progress of invention, from the way in which again and again what seemed the most perfect form of gun has been replaced by a better, there is apt to come over the public mind a weariness of the whole subject, a sense of being continually plagued by contending inventors and by technical details, till sleepiness creeps over us, and we willingly leave to constituted authority all responsibility for the determination of a matter
