TOPICS OF THE DAY
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THE NAVAL DEBATE.
THE British Fleet may be perfect or imperfect, able to sweep the seas, or fit only to be broken up and reorgan- ised from the beginning, but at all events, the method of discussing its condition is the most anomalous conceivable. A civilian, carefully primed with facts which he has only half digested, gets up and makes to a great number of Members, who, as a body, know nothing about the matter, a long, despondent statement on the condition of the Fleet. As he is a party leader as well as a First Lord, he is sure to wander from his very dry subject into an argument showing that the late First Lord did not half know his business, and that the late late First Lord did. Then the late First Lord rises to prove that he did know his business, and that the new First Lord does not ; that every thing is tolerably right, and that at all events, whether we have ships enough or no, we can beat everybody else. Then the few experts in the House chime in, the most technical questions are discussed, the characters of vessels are pulled to pieces or eulogised, and finally the House votes ten millions a year for the maintenance of the Fleet, over which the First Lord has just sung his melancholy dirge. To add to the absurdity of the whole business, the permanent advisers of the First Lord, and of the late First Lord, and of the late late First Lord, are frequently the same men, while the whole discussion, by the formal admission of Mr. Ward Hunt, turns round a pivot of some £200,000 a year, which one side would like to save by "making things do " a little longer, and the other would like to spend in attaining perfection and making every- body comfortable now and at once. If ever there was a case in which the French system was better than our own, and a report from a Committee on the Fleet, with the First Lord and the late First Lord cross-examined before it for three days, ought to precede discussion in the full House, it is this case of the Navy Estimates ; but it would be easier to alter the British Constitu- tion than the procedure of the House of Commons, and so the acknowledged absurdity must continue. Mr. Goschen may protest against recriminations which are purely historical, but the House enjoys them as a relief from professional details, and so they must go on.
So far as the Parliamentary debate of this year is con- cerned—the debate, we mean, of Monday—Mr. Goschen, the late First Lord, has clearly the best of it. If Mr. Ward Hunt, the present First Lord, means anything by his speech, he means that he finds the Fleet neglected, wants some money, a good deal of money, to repair ironclads, and shall ask for it by-and-by, and the answer to that statement is, in a Parliamentary sense, complete. Why does he not ask for his money now, when his colleague, Sir Stafford Northcote, has six millions to give away ? Where, if all that money is spent —and the speciality of Sir Stafford's Budget is that he leaves a very narrow margin, or even anticipates future surpluses—. is Mr. Ward Hunt to get his cash, and be sure at the same time of not increasing the permanent Debt ? Is he acting proprio mote, or is he acting with his financial colleague, who of course does not want to see a deficit next year, which would, in the public eye, explode all the claim to administra- tive skill which the Conservatives are now making ? They have administrative skill, mainly because they have the best administrative Peers,---for they do not breed more administrat ors in the Commons than the Liberals do ;—but that skill will be popularly judged by its financial result, and anything like a deficit will produce a shudder through the City. Yet there must be one if the Budget is carried, and Mr. Ward Hunt realises the vision raised by his heart-stirring nonsense about his deter- mination to have none of a paper fleet.
Upon the substantial question, the effectiveness of the Steam Fleet, Mr. Ward Hunt made out a case which, if it were only as correct in fact as it looks on paper, he would never have attempted to make out, for he would have remedied the evils he complained of before revealing them, in that off-hand style, to the outer world. He says that we have nominally forty-one ironclads, but so many are under repair, ineffective, or with rotten boilers, that the effective Iron Fleet cannot be reckoned at more than eighteen ironclads,—" effective, that is, in the proper sense for service during this present year." The boilers in the new ships wear out so quickly, the cost of repairs is so heavy, the rate of building new ships has, been so slow, that England has not the fleet she calculates on, but has, as far as ironclads are con-
cerned, eighteen, instead of forty-one. Mr. Ward Hunt, how- ever, declined to disclose the names of those effective ships, or to discuss their character, feeling, he said, that this course would be imprudent, but in those very names lies the whole secret of the policy recently pursued. Mr. Ward Hunt talks of ironclads as women talk of ships, as if one were precisely as good as another, as if the effectiveness of the Hercules' were the same thing as the effectiveness of
the Wyvern.' The " eighteen ships effective for the service of this year " are in themselves a fleet with which nothing afloat can compare, which would utterly shatter and destroy any fleet, or any combination of fleets, which a sane politician is justified in taking into practical account. These effectives are the giants of the maritime world, not the ships classed as ironclads only because they are plated with more or less of iron. Take one of the worst of conceivable cases, the sudden falling of the French and Spanish ports into the hands of Communists, and a mad rush without declaration of war to plunder London or rouse English Socialists to insurrection. Not one French. or Spanish ship could by any conceivable misadventure, short of Her Majesty's Fleet joining the expedition, ever enter the or the Mersey. No matter the daring displayed, no matter the contempt for law or for precedent, the telegraph would in six hours set forces in motion ready for actual fight with which those fleets could not hope to contend successfully. Add the entire fleet of Germany—a mere suggestion, to exhaust possibili- ties—and the time needed would only be enlarged by forty- eight hours. Numbers have nothing to do with strength in days like these, when one ' Devastation ' would send 500 transports to the bottom in as many minutes ; and the coast is patrolled, so to speak, by the huge floating corps d'armere—for that is the military equivalent of a first-rate ironclad—which used to lie idle at Portsmouth, not nearly so ready as they are now. Of the remaining ships, ten are inevitably under repair, and will be under repair during Mr. Ward Hunt's Administra- tion, and the next Administration, and it may be every Admin- istration of this century, until science discovers a method of protracting boilers' lives, or England is willing to pay for new boilers whenever a ship is recommissioned, and for putting them in at war speed without regard to cost. So excessive is the wear and tear of the boilers in the new Fleet, that one in four, twenty-five per cent., must always, in time of peace, be under repair, though no doubt in time of war they could be driven for another year, or by excessive expenditure be made ready in sixty days. As to the rest and less significant vessels, some are under ordinary repair, some mere " inefficients " from the beginning—that is, not up to the requirements of the age—and one or two are only ironclads in name, lumber, to be cleared out, or used for any duty except fighting. They ought not to be on the ironclad list at all, but to be placed on the retired list, or named among the Third Reserve. The classification adopted in Parliamentary debate tends only to mislead, the true fighting fleet being as efficient as it is possible for a fleet to be, and certainly irresistible. The public forget that French, or Spanish, or German, or American boilers have no special tenure of life ; that the same proportion wear them- selves out everywhere, and that the evil is nearly as much felt by the Ocean Steam Companies as by the Admiralty. The single point upon which there has been a falling-off is in the speed of construction of new ironclads, and this, as Mr. Ward Hunt admits, Mr. Goschen saw, and placed on the Estimates 600 more men solely to quicken the rate of dockyard progress. If Mr. Ward Hunt wants still more money for that, or for in- creasing the speed at which repairs can be executed—which is, up to a certain point, a matter of money—let him take that too ; but at least let him abstain from frightening all England with the idea of a neglected Fleet, while accepting, without a single material change, his predecessor's Estimates.
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