Page:The Next Naval War - Eardley-Wilmot - 1894.djvu/11

 inequality being removed by a united Republic, the fleets would meet once more with nothing specially to favour either side.

From the close of the Franco-German war, when it was evident that a fleet to perform efficient service must be not only strong in numbers but ready to act at short notice, great labour had been bestowed, and no expense spared, in France to gradually build up a naval force which in some respects could not be surpassed even in this country. With the special gift of organisation and talent for mechanical invention for which France has always been famous, the establishments she created for the manufacture of warlike material, and the extended experiments on which every step was based, gave her great advantages in the marvellous development of ordnance which had been going on for thirty years. In this country, having starved experimental work and given the cold shoulder to inventors, we were content to adopt our neighbours' designs, and plod on just ten years behind them in this most important branch.

The same with armour. While the rest of the world had seen that steel must replace iron, we had long adhered to the latter for some fanciful reason that, though it let the projectiles into the ship more easily, it did not crack to the same extent as the harder material. It was not recognised that if a plate kept out six shells and then fell into the sea in fragments it had done more