The Press.
London, England, 1855-08-18 00:00:00

SIR CHARLES WOOD AND MR. LINDSAY.

SLR CHARLES WOOD has neither enjoyed a brief
,triumph over, nor even a short release from, that
thorn in his side " the Tynemouth shipowner.
Mr. LINDSAY, in a pamphlet of some sixty pages, has
returned to the charge of his Drury-Lane assertions
with tenfold vigour ; and taking up, seriatim et
verbatim, Sir CHARLES WOOD'S denials in the
House of those imputations against the conduct
of the Admiralty in various matters connected with
the Transport Service, he thoroughly exposes the
mystifications of Sir CHARLES WOOD'S defence, and
more strongly than ever fixes his charge of
gross mismanagement upon the Board of Ad-
miralty. The incompetence of a Whig Board of
Admiralty is traditional. To seek for proof we need
go no farther back than the days of Sir CHARLES
ADAM, when he boasted in the Rouse of our maritime
resources against invasion comprising two liners and
a guard-ship. Since that creditable admission
it would be a long work to count up the
blunders, failures, and extravagance, which has,
more or less, been characteristic of every Whig I
Board that the country has had the misfortune
to endure. True to their principles, the existing
Board of Admiraity have endeavoured, particularly
in the Transport Department, to combine the
utmost waste of money with the least possible result.
"My Lords " in that department have revelled in a
" liberty of negligence and a superfluity of means "
to a degree that must have excited painful regrets
among the ghosts of departed Whig Lords.
We are no admirers of Mr. LINDSAY or of his party
of Administrative Reformers ; but no one who reads
his pamphlet will deny that he has incontestably the
best of the argument with the Admiralty—that he
brings home his charges with force and truth—and that
he as fully establishes them as he disproves the
counter charges brought against him by Sir CHARLES
WOOD.

. _
We have not space to enter into his charges in de-
tail—they will be well remembered—the ship ordered
from Deptford to Newcastle, en route to the Crimea ;
the 2,649 horses for the army in England for two
months, because the steam-transports bad not re-
turned from the Black Sea, though a fleet of sailing
ships could have been obtained, at 16s. a ton, early in
March, instead of steamers at 60s. a ton, in May ; the
refusal of the Admiralty, ata most pressing time for the
at my, upon some ridiculous rule or other, to hire ships
for transport, which upon their refusal were imme-
diately after taken up by the French Government;
the gross errors of the printed transport returns,
which Sir CHARLES WOOD excused on the plea of
general ignorance ; and, finally, the wilful misstate-
ments and prevarications which Sir CHARLES WooD
appears to have persisted in throughout his speech ;
all these points are taken up seriatim, and
apparently proved. But there is one case which
Mr. LINDSAY appears to have been at some pains to
elucidate. We all remember the circumstance of the
Perseverance, a steamer, turning a summerset, one
day in the dry-dock at Woolwich, hut we never
could get at the reason of that remarkable accident.

The true state of the case, upon the authority of
Mr. LINDSAY, is as follows :

She was a ship built especially for speed, with fair space,
beautifully proportioned, and with flush deck. The
Admiralty, however, were bent upon improvement : the
ship was docked at Woolwich, and fitted with poop and
forecsatle—possibly because no such thing was cur

SATURDAY,

heard of in the last war as a Government transport without
a huge poop to form a quarter-deck. Possibly, also, the
next step was to keep up the official dignity of the
ship.
Her original owners intended to fit her with brigatine
masts and yards, but, according to " Establishment," arli
regardless of her symetrical proportions and narrow beam,
her Majesty's servants of the Admiralty rigged her out
with the masts and yards of a seventy-four, and put on
board the anchors of a seventy-four; and were so marvelously
successful in their amendments upon the due proportions
of masts, spars, and bull, that the ship overset in the
dock, her towering masts and spars dashed in the roof and
wall of the new saw-mills, whilst the hull drove out of place
and even broke some of the massive blocks of granite of
the quay wall. After this mishap there were no more
attempts to make the ship stand up under the masts of a
seventy-four; she was sent away to Sheerness, and fitted
with more humble masts.
Thus masted, and after so much mischief and delay, the
original proprietors were appealed to, to appoint her officers
and equip her for sea. The captain was a man of expe-
rience,—the ship herself had shaken off the Admiralty
masts, bat neither ship nor captain could get rid of the
Admiralty anchors; go she must with the anchors of a
seventy-four, thirteen tons weight, and worth DOM., when
her own proper anchors would have cost 3001., and would
not have weighed seven tons.
-

Now, was ever such a case of flagrant incapacity
as this? Which was the "official cat" guilty here?
This case surely could be brought home to some
one, for where was the necessity to alter tht)
vessel's rig at all? But the public are used to
these lamentable failures in the Admiralty, and
whether the Perseverance topples over, or a floating-
battery refuses to steer, or a ship fails to carry her
armament, the blunder must be accepted as an in-
evitable necessity, and endured on the homely prin..
ciple that it is not to be cured, as long as a Whig
Board is in office.

The poverty of Sir CHARLES WOOD'S defence h
singularly exemplified by his attempting to bring
charges in return against Mr. LINDSAY. A "tu
quoque " is at all times the feeblest of retorts, but
the cases of Admiralty mismanagement and personal
failure are not at all analogous. In the one case,
the public pay the very preposterous piper who is
always coming to our doors with his book in his
hand; and in the other, the individual shipowner
bears his own losses. But we cannot agree with Mr.
LINDSAY that the cure for all this mismanagement is
the appointment of a naval man to the head of the
Board, or of a great shipowner to the post, like Mr.
LINDSAY himself, for instance. We quite agree with
Mr. LINDSAY that the First Lord of the Admiralty, as
well as all the members of that Board, ought to be
fully acquainted with maritime business, but we don't
want a First Lord from Mr. LINDSAY'S peculiai
school. Mr. LINDSAY is a man who by industry and
frngality has worked his way up in life from the position
of a cabin-boy to that of a wealthy merchant. So much
the more credit to him; and we should be quitewi,li g
to accept his industry without his frugality as an excel-
lent qualification for a First Lord. Mr. LINDSAY may
rail, and justly, at " profuse waste," yet we must have
a liberal expenditure. All that we need is a
sound and vigorous Cabinet united in their policy,
fitted for their departments, and determined to
educe the resources and skill of this country in the
successful prosecution of this war—to use them
liberally without extravagance, in such a manner
as shall contribute to the most successful result.
That this has not been done yet, the Sebastopol Com-
mittee and Mr. LINDSAY'S pamphlet sufficiently show :
that it would be accomplished by a Cabinet of Admin-
sitrative Reformers, who, as Rabelais says,
Can, after all, do nothing
But new-vamp rusty saws,
no one with a grain of that common sense Mr.
LINDSAY is so fond of, believes for a moment.
Meanwhile we should like to receive Sir CHARLES
WOOD'S reply to this pamphlet.

THE official statement regarding the results of the
applications for the New French Loan has at length
been issued. The number of subscribers actually
amounts to 316,864. The capital subscribed for is
3,652,591,985f.—name1y, subscriptions of 50f. and
under, which are not to be reduced, 231,920,155 f.; of
60f. and upwards, subject to proportionate reduc-
tion, 3,420,671,830 f. The departments have furnished
236.577 i.nbscribers for an amount of 1,118,703,535 f.
The 2,538,888,450 f. subscribed in Paris included
about 600 millions from abroad. The tenth part dc..
posited in Paris and in the departments by way
of guarantee forms a total of 365,259,198 f. The
Minister of Finance, in order to prevent the unneces-
sary absorption of so large an amount of capital in
excess of the ten per cent. instalment required on the
subscription, began to repay the subscribers in Paris
on the day succeeding the closing of the applications,
and upwards of 5,000,0001. has been reimbursed to
the subscribers, thus leaving about 0,500,0001. to be
still returned.

FOR the last twelve months not a single expedition
has taken place, nor a single gun been fired, in
Algeria. This is the first time since 1830 that such
a remark could be made.

-71 FF-"

Auo. 18, 1855.

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