Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/203

 sixty-eight pounders of ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to constitute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten twelve, fourteen twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going to build a warship with armour-plate three feet thick) on the one hand and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns, works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and the greater