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 purely British wars, so that we tended to lose our sense of the value of battleships as 'negotiators.' Three years after the Crimean War a Treasury Committee found that our relative strength to that of France had so far diminished that the prospect before us was that, in 1861, France would possess forty-four steam line-of-battle ships, of which four were iron-plated, as compared with forty for Great Britain, of which none were iron-plated. In 1860 the First Lord of the Admiralty stated in the House of Commons that 'we had no Channel Squadron whatever, that we had no naval defence of our own coast' Four years after the American Civil War there was again a scare about our naval strength, and two years aft«r the Franco-German War the First Lord of the Admiralty described our navy as existing largely on paper, many ships being mere dummies. Even so we continued to build muzzle-loading guns for our ships up to 1880, while every European navy had adopted the breechloader. The result was that at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the exception of four guns in the Italian Navy, Great Britain was the only nation with muzzle-loading guns, and of these she possessed over 800 in battleships and coast-defence vessels. In the present year it was discovered that many of the existing heavy guns of the navy were defective, and the Admiralty decided to increase the reserve of guns, which only amounted to 25 per cent. of the armament, as compared with 100 per cent. provided by Japan. These sorry results will always follow when attention is absorbed by minor details instead of vital requirements, and when statesmen quit the sure arguments of history and experiments for plausible guesswork. No more baneful conjecture was ever made than when Peel coined the phrase that 'steam had bridged the Channel,' and Palmerston passed it into the currency of our thoughts.

In the early days of steamers an Admiralty memorandum in reference to the mails had laid it down that it was the bounden duty of the Government to discourage per cent.