THE NAVAL SUPREMACY OF GREAT BRITAIN.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 283, 8 May 1875, Page 3

THE NAVAL SUPREMACY OF GREAT BRITAIN.

On Thursday the Maplin Sands witnessed a scene of which England may be justly proud. An iron-clad frigate, English all over, of English iron, English workmanship, and with English engines, ou being put to the usual tests in the presence o£ its purchasers, was found to attain a greater speed than had been bargained for, much to the satisfaction of all concerned. A private firm built the ship, and the German Government is now the possessor of this formidable weapon of war. Whatever opinion the Germans may entertain of our genius, our powers of invention, or our part in European politics, they admit us to be shipbuilders. They have shown a certain respect for the British Admiralty injrequiring that the trials of the Kaiser should be conducted in strict accordance with the arrangements followed in the British Navy for men-of-war We almost wish we could have added that the armament also was to be of English workmanship. But a power which is able to bring into the field 3500 guns, and which can undertake to supply all the world if necessary, may be excused for not honoring us with this order as well as the rest. It is more becoming, too, that the ship should leave this country unarmed. Messrs Samuda contribute the fabric of this leviathan, Messrs Penn the motive power, and Krupp the destructive, in the form of nine steel guns, each of 22 tons weight. Since the Kaiser has proved so great a success, it is not improbable that its fortunate owner wlil give us a little more of his custom. We have here one great firm, the State itself, which is continually making experiments, and occasionally failures, that can be seen and avoided. The arguments for a Government doing, or attempting to do everything itself, have been so often called in question and so often found irrefragable that we leave them as they are; but somehow it does happen that our private shipyards are sometimes more successful than our dockyards. Success we are aware, is a vulgar thiug ; it is nobler only to deserve it; but the Germans, like many other ipeople, are content with the more solid satisfaction. They have now a capital ship. They know where they may get others like it. They have a good model for their own shipbuilders. If they could but find a good port, or make one, they might have docks and shipbuilding yards as good as ours, and better too, as having the benefit of our experience. However, one way or another, they are making a navy which they intend to be a match for any other navy in the world —any two of them, if necessary. To have the best army in the world and not the best navy is, to German ideas, an abnormal development. The maritime ideal exists. It has only to be embodied. " Every man sees his work before him" is a saying of good workmen. Germany sees its navy. It has labored under a difficulty of getting out of its own shell. Surmounting this, it wishes to be sure of getting at a foe wherever necessary. It would be quite useless in these days to say a word in disparagement of the happy usage by which we fiud ourselves arming a power formidable to all the world and terrible to its own neighbours. " Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." The evil of to-day is the necessity of being as well armed and equipped as our neighbours and as well prepared for immediate action. It is needless to say what may happen any day, for it is impossible to say what may not; and recent history has much enlarged the scope of reasonable forethought in this matter. But that it is not the best of a proper preparation in these days at least. We are alternately challenged and invited to keep pace with our neighbours, to be as good as they, and to do as they do if we would be worthy of their company, with the ever-implied intimation that should we fail to do this, we must take the consequences. How do we stand, then, in the case of fresh turmoil, with sea and land all about us in commotion, and British interests, not to say British alliances and friendships, deeply and immediately at stake. We presume that nexi month the gentlemen who undertake for our army and navy will be able to give a tolerable account of both arms, and tell us what we can do in an emergency. We wish we could take for granted that the answer given to this question one year might be presumed almost as good for the next; but every year changes the state of affairs, and is not without its effects on the comparative strength of navies. These monsters of modern warfare, made as they are of the strongest and most enduring materials, are practically short-lived, frail, and subject to all the laws of change, whether material or moral. They knock themselves to pieces ; they cannot go to sea for a few weeks without the discovery of inconvenience and defects ; their shields, like those of antiquity, worry and weaken the arms that bear them; they suffer alike from continual rust and the varying, intermittent strain. Big and full-grown as it looks, the ironclad frigate is yet in its infancy, and what we see today will in a few years be as obsolete as the steam fleet which was reviewed at Spithead shortly before the Russian war. Yet such, so unstable and so untrustworthy, is the force to which we must consider our army merely as subordinate. On the land we give it up—that is, on any land except our own. The navy is our main chance, and we must stick to it. But that does not hinder the inquiry how far we can make even our little army go, if we have occasion to use it. Being so small a force, it has to be, therefore, so disposable as to be virtually übiquitous. Neither our ambition nor our convenience will allow us to keep it all at home for the protection of these isles. What remains here is the residuum, a depot, and the reserves ; and these we have to manipulate so as to do the duty of ten times their number if necessary. The difficulties of the army, it is admiltod, increases from year to year ; and if there were no other reason, the necessity of a perfectly efficient navy would each year be greater also: Unhappily, we cannot but fear that the difficulties of the navy all but keep pace with those of the army. All the conditions of this question seem to be sharing more than ever the treacherous character of the element itself. When a ship is con demned or quietly laid aside, it is as good as sunk in action, for there is an end of it; yet such is the end of many a ship which was a splendid novelty and magnificent addition to our naval strength but the other day. Yet every such disappearance has to be accounted for, and ought to be fully recognised by a nation which has so much to maintain and defend in these days. Though the question of our naval armament has been asked as a matter of course every year since we had one at all, it had never to be asked more seriously than now. Europe is in arms, rio longer on fch? land only, but now as much by tea as pn

land, and is almost as ambitious of naval as of military supremacy. Hitherto on the :ea we have hardly had one rival; now we have several. For the present we seem to be secure, because they are not agreed, or, as we may hope, likely to agree. But it is quite certain they are all jealous of our naval honours, which we have not always borne as meekly as might be.— Times,