The Sun.
London, England, 1862-06-27 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
LONDON, FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 1862.

The men who ought to know—and who do
know—are beginning, effectively, to make their
appeal to the public on the great question of Na-
tional Defence. We noticed a few days ago Sir
MORTON PETO'S masterly pamphlet, in which,
single-handed, he showed himself more than a
match for the six Defence Commissioners, their
pragmatical secretary, and their four associates;
and Monday night showei very plainly that Sir
MORTON had convinced the House of Commons, by
the somewhat ignominious retreat of the Government
respecting the Spithead forts. We have now ano-
ther pamphlet, a re-writing of one published a year
ago, by a geetleman as conversant with shipbuild -
ing and dockyard works as Sir MORTON is with
general engieeering works. Mr. SCOTT RUSSELL,
is his " Fleet of the Future" (Longmans), has ex-
posed the impotency and the incapacity of the Ad-
miralty, and shown what requires to be done so
clearly, that his views need but an effective man to
propound and support them in the House of Com-
mons, in order to render his pamphlet as practically
serviceable to the country as Sir MORTON PETO'S.
Every member of both Houses ought to have a
copy, and a move ought to be made on the subject
this year.
Mr. RUSSELL, indeed, justly observes that a body
of six hundred men is net the proper one to take in
hand the management of a department. or in any
way to usarp the functions of the Executive ; but
the sad fact is that the Duke of SOMERSET himself
throws the responsibility on the House of Com-
mons of telling him how he is to do his work, what
kind of ships he is to build, and how marry
-of each
sort. His excuse, for inexcusable Admiralty de-
linquencies, is that the House of Common did not
" press on him" to give up building wooden ships
and to build iron. He and the Admiralty have no
notion of leading the House, they await its instruc-
tions in the details of their department. The
avowed maxim of their late surveyor, a good sailor,
but one who boasted of his ignorance of building
ships, was that we were not to lead but to follow
other nations in shipbuilding improvements !
The grand genera charge against the Admiralty
Mr. RUSSELL limits, in his pamphlet, to the last
seven years—the years since we have had the expe-
rience of our Bleck Sea operations before Sebastopol
and Kinburn. We there learned ourselves, what the
Turks learned at Sinope, that shells made slaughter-
hoases of our wooden ships, and that the entire
crew, officers and all, were actually driven in a
rce‘acirlUblV panic out of the oppuaite aide of one of
our first-rates into a steamer close by, by three
horizontal shells, which actually killed eighteen
men. The Congress c xperienced the same fate at
Hampton-roads from the shells of the Merrimac.
We also learned that the iron and floating batteries,
even in their first imperfect construction, were
absolutely uninjured under a heavy fire at Kin-
burn. The general charge is that, since then, since
the Emperor of the FRENCH, in consequence of our
common experience, immediately changed his plans,
our Admiralty has spent, in the dockyards, THIRTY
MILLIONS sterling, and the result has been only
two seaworthy iron ships. That vast sum of
money—one-eighth of the income of every Income-
tax payer—has been wasted, blundered away, and
left us none the more secure, at the cost of one-
eighth of each of our incomes ! Mr. RUSSELL con-
trasts with the stupidity, officialism, and routine
muddling away of the nation's money, the business-
like dockyard changes and proceedings of the EM-
PEROR, after the lessons taught both allies by the
shells on shipboard at Sebastopol, and the iron-
plated batteries at Kinburn. He at once discarded
the routinists of the old school, selected the moat
able young man in his service, and arranged a sys-
tem by which, at a cost of less than we have already
wasted, he will in no long time have a fine fleet of

ironsides. He shows that by this time, had we
used the money we have spent as well as our ally
does, we might have had THREE FLEETS OF
TWENTY WARRIORS EACH in the Channel, the West
Indies, and the Mediterranean.

Mr. RUSSELL lays down that, to effect this ob-
ject in the next seven years, we must make one
great alteration at the Admiralty—it must devote
itself to getting a Fleet, not to keeping up and
) patronising vast establishments. The latter is the
old and routine course : it involves all the plea-
sures and political conveniences of Government
patronage. But the ruinous fact is that the money
wasted on Government establishments would itself
buy ns a large Fleet. We have builders who can
do all the work better than the Government pos-
sibly can; who now do the most skilled part of the
work—the engines and other fittings—who have
actually turned out of their yards the iron ships on
: Nt vehutieirah
testimony e now rely, and who are competent, on the
of Mr. RUSSELL, who names the places
where they can be built, to turn out twelve War-
riors every two
th:etiarusk, or at the rate of one every
two months. on
this point Mr. RUSSELL shows
cic ii, I'd SOMERSETreake for
several
vme mismanaged
vessels.
ensasge
lesd.
tlih°ew contractsgrossly which he e
It is for the Duke to answer Mr. RUSSELL if he
can. It will not do to ignore
what comes from
" such a man"—we Suppose We our
oht to say "such
a quarter"—as if Mr. RUSSELL were not perfectly
informed on what he writes about. And if he can-
not answer him, the inevitable conclusion is that
be has at the s,:,:ne time muddled away public
money, and duped the country into believing that
he was doing more with it than he actually did.
" Buy your Fleet" is our author's advice ; this is the
only way you get good engines for your ships, and
' it is the only way you will get good ships to put
them into. The " Establishments" bad succeeded
last April in getting r d of four millions of money
in the year; they have turned out the keel and
some frames of one Achilles with the money ! Pri- J
vate yards would have given us for it eight War-
riors, all comp,etely found.
Mr. RUSSELL strongly objects to conversion. He
gives a ludicrous, but practical account of what it
is. He affirms, as a builder, that when all is done,