has been thrust; that is to say, possessed with
a wild activity for the repair of damage. Upon
all such matters there is never a touch of craven
alarm in English panic, though we couple the
alarmist with the panic-monger. Our alarm is
in the old military sense of the word, when
"Sound the alarm!" was the word to the
trumpeter, who, by a breath, turned rest into action,
and made of ten thousand men one man having
the power of ten thousand. No doubt it is true
that we are wise in delivering our neighbours
from temptation. The French people have an
inconvenient regard for military glory, as a
motive for, not an accident of war. They are now
subject to a government that partly exists by giving
evidence of military strength, that cannot keep
its soldiers long inactive, and that, if England
by too much neglect of armament should seem
to many vain imaginations easy prey, might
even, through false confidence, be tempted to
destroy itself at our expense. Every man has
two sides to his hand: on one side, a palm wherewith
to give and take in peace and friendship:
on the other side, an armament of knuckles.
Where the knuckles are weak, the grasp also
of the palm is feeble. Let us arm, then, and
with iron gauntlets to our fists if we see that
our neighbours are providing themselves with
them! But do not let us leave out of account,
while we compare the artificial arms of each that
are to be wielded, that even their power also has
to come out of the natural arms that are to
wield them. England has pluck and determination
the most obstinate, the strongest natural
arm in the world, and the best provided
cupboard wherefrom to sustain its strength. There
are men who can disarm the practised fencer
with a broomstick. England could still do more
than a little execution with her wooden fleet,
which may be obsolete, but is not, therefore,
useless.

It is only under certain conditions, at present
rare, that wooden ships are over-matched by
Merrimacs and Monitors and Warriors and Gloires.
The Merrimac had to be blown up, the Monitor
out at sea was a swimming shower-bath to the
men shut up in her. The Gloire is a desperately
bad sailer. Meanwhile, our numerous wooden
ships glide over the sea, able to carry troops and
arms to all corners of the earth, and their sides
bristle with guns that are by no means out of
date, since experiment continues to prove that
at short range the shots of the old smooth-bored
artillery are more effective than those of the
best modern rifled gun, whose superiority lies
altogether in their character as arms of precision
at long range. The great blunder of some who
make outcry, lies in their belief that new
discoveries, which can be adopted only in course
of time at immense cost, instantly supersede
existing usages. Because a floating iron turtle
has destroyed in harbour, several wooden ships
that lay anchored and untrimmed within its
reach, we are to assume that our whole existing
navy, except in so far as it is iron-plated, may
as well be sold by auction for old timber. We
are building what Mr. Scott Russell calls "the
Fleet of the Future," but we are also using the
Fleet of the Present. If we had to fight
tomorrow, we could deliver some stout blows with
that same Fleet of the Present. Mr. Scott
Russell has written a very good pamphlet indeed,
about the necessity of having iron ships; but
the fallacy of argument in extremes, appears
clearly enough in its very title: The Fleet of
the Future in 1862; or, England without a
Fleet. It would have been as true to say, when
Caxton was about to set up his presses, The
Books of the Future in 1462; or, England
without Books. Prospero's wand still lies
at the bottom of the sea, and the naval
engineers of no country in the world have fished
it up.

Mr. Scott Russell complains that the Admiralty
did not begin soon enough to make its iron
ships. If not, so far as regards the comparison
between nations, it is making up for lost time.
Making and made, we are at the beginning of our
third dozen. But the House of Commons, Mr.
Russell thinks, should take the matter into its
own hands. "At one and the same time," he
tells us, " all these things want reconstruction;
first, the Admiralty and its departments;
secondly, the navy and its classes; thirdly,
marine artillery, its ammunition, and the
mechanism to work it; fourthly, naval tactics,
technics, and warfare; fifthly, the dockyards,
their functions and organisation." Happily for
us, man is man all the world over, and those
people only die the sooner, who attempt to get
through more than a life's work in a lifetime.
But then we have this home-thrust. The use of
iron ships and the weakness of our wooden ships
was known, says Mr. Scott Russell, seven years
ago. If we had begun then to build Warriors,
and had spent on them all the money that was
applicable to the maintenance of the fleet afloat,
we could have had by this time twenty Warriors
in the Channel, twenty in the Mediterranean,
and twenty in the West Indies—ships without
men. The navy estimates Mr. Russell divides
in even halves between the fleet afloat and the
dockyards, with the work done in them, and the
whole of the sum paid for maintenance of the
fleet afloat might, he says, have been spent in
building sixty Warriors, stopping meanwhile the
maintenance of the existing wooden fleet and
the pay of the men. Fifty years ago the navy
estimates for this country were a million and a
half. In the year before the Crimean war they
were six millions and a quarter, and the vote
was for a personnel of thirty-nine thousand men.
The Crimean war raised the navy estimates to
sixteen millions and a quarter, and at its close
they were cut down again by one half. The
estimates have risen again since then. But while
much of the additional money has been spent on
ship-building, plating and Warrior-making, some
has gone to improvement of the seaman's
condition.

But a great deal has gone to the dockyards,
and here Mr. Scott Russell raises the large question
whether it is worth the country's while to
be its own manufacturer, and pay the cost of