large establishments, in which jobbery abounds,
and men do not work as they must under an
employer whose success in life depends upon his
seeing that they all perform their duty.
Government buys its guns, and goes to market for
its engines; it has gone to market even for its
iron ships; and whatever may have been the
case years ago, before the immense recent
development of British manufacturing enterprise,
there now is no difficulty in getting anything
made that can be paid for, and in getting it well
made at the fairest price of good work and
material, by the use of a little ordinary care and
skilled attention. A large part of our existing
dockyard machinery is an arrangement of offices
and salaries for getting done, in the costliest and
most ineffective way, what could be done
perfectly well and without waste, by simple purchase
of the articles required: whether ships or ship's
biscuits. No doubt there are now associated with
the dockyards, large staffs of men whose salaries
are their lives, and whose salaries ought not to be
taken from them. But the principle of reliance
upon the free competing energies of trade having
been once largely admitted by the Admiralty, with
time and tact and a humane exercise of reason
the gradual passage might be made out of a half
faith in one system into a full reliance on the
other. A few book-keepers and accountants, with
some shrewd, practical surveyors to inspect the
work of contractors and report to the surveyor
general, would be quite staff enough for the
ship-building department of the Admiralty civil
service; and the money taken from the
maintenance of many men in a state of half torpid
attention to routine, would then be spent to
advantage on the large development of that
independent energy which is itself the first in rank
of the defences of the country.

It is against the immense waste to the country
involved in the dockyard establishments that the
famous ship-builder—who no longer builds, and,
therefore, is not urged by direct interest for a
particular shop of his own—hits home. It was
thought to be cheap to convert ships. A fleet
of sailing-vessels was, in fact, converted by the
Admiralty into a fleet of steamers by cutting
across or letting a new piece into the middle, to
admit the engines, altering the stern to fit the
screw, and lengthening the bow. Returns were
made of cost of labour and material, and of
buying engines. All seemed clear. But the
expense of the establishment that was to see all
this done, never appeared in the estimate. In
twenty years, forty large ships and frigates were
converted into steamers; forty more were built.
But, including in their expense that of the
establishment that exists only to produce them,
they cost fifty millions. The same money would
have bought, new from the ship-builders, a fleet
of two hundred first-class steam-frigates. The
iron ship-builders of the present, with the
resources now at their command, can, says Mr.
Scott Russell, produce, in a couple of years,
twelve Warriors, and go on supplying us with one
every two months: four in the two years being
built by four firms on the Thames: three on the
Mersey: three on the Clyde: one on the Tyne:
and one on the Severn. The Admiralty failed,
he says, with its contractors, by accepting from
inexperienced men tenders for work done at an
impossible price in impossible time. The tender
system requires always the check of discretion
and skill in the person who receives tenders.
The skilled subordinates of the Admiralty knew,
says Mr. Scott Russell, that a ship of the
Warrior class cannot be completed within less than
twenty-four months, and that its fair price is
fifty pounds a ton. They knew also, who were
the skilled and competent builders. But in
making the contracts for iron ships which should
be now ready and are not ready, this knowledge,
Mr. Scott Russell asserts, was not used.
Promise of early possession of an iron fleet was
made, he says, upon the faith of
inexperienced contractors, whose error, jumping
with the public wish, it was convenient to
encourage.

In the opinion of Mr. Russell, the originator
of the idea that ships-of-war might be put into
iron armour was Mr. R. L. Stevens,
American engineer and ship-builder, who fourteen
years ago had found by experiment that six
inches thick of plates of iron bolted to the
outside of a wooden ship, formed a perfect protection
against the heaviest artillery then in use.
The experiments were carried on by the
American government. But the first to carry this
idea into practical effect was the French
emperor, who himself designed the shot-proof floating
battery Avalanche, brought with success
in 'fifty-five against the land batteries of
Kinburn. Of that floating battery the armour was
not, according to Mr. Stevens's plan, composed
of six plates each an inch thick, but of one solid
four-inch plate, as suggested by Mr. Thomas
Lloyd, of the Admiralty. It is now being
asserted in America that the series of inch plates
has proved itself a better defence than the single
solid plate. It was found also at Sebastopol that
a wooden ship could not stand the horizontal fire
of shells between its decks. After the Crimean
war the French emperor, says Mr. Russell, at once
resolved to finish the timber ships then in hand,
but otherwise to spend his annual ship-building
money upon iron vessels. Since that time, we
are told, he has spent twenty millions for ships:
we thirty. But he has spent his money upon
iron, with one exception in favour of wood; we
upon wood, with one exception in favour of iron.
In fact, "conversion" is as much practised in
France as in England.

Mr. Scott Russell believes in large iron
ships, and is angry with the Admiralty for
having shown a determined wish to get the
principle of the Warrior applied to vessels of
half its size: so causing to be built, the Defence
and Resistance, Hector and Valiant. Indeed,
we began in 'fifty-six with the iron-clad floating
battery Erebus, of sixteen guns, and not quite a
third the burthen of the Warrior. The country,
last year, voted money for six more ships of the
Warrior class, and we are, on the whole, so far
advanced, that England has two dozen to France's