The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-10 00:00:00

either acted on a principle which has been proved,
and built these mailed frigates, or shown reasons

why that principle is fallacious, and rejected it ?
They have done neither the one nor the other. Sir
J. Paking ton long ago ordered the building by con-
tract of the' iron frigates alluded to, and of two
other smaller ones, and one or two of these may be
ready by next Christmas twelvemonth.

By doing this the Admiralty acquiesced in the
conclusion, as a scientific result, that wooden ships
are henceforth an anachronism, yet they go on
spending the millions upon millions that the nation
has so lavishly and cheerfully voted them in ever
laying down new keels of fresh wooden war ships
on every slip as it becomes vacant in our dock-
yards. What is the explanation of this ?
What else can it be than this—that the dockyard
officials know that their occupation will be gone the
day that the Lords of the Admiralty are compelled
by public opinion through the press and in Parlia-
ment to act on a principle, the truth of which at
present they do not or will not see, It is no won-
der, therefore, that every dockyard receives the
Lords of the Admiralty with a shake of the head
over the failure of iron plates before British guns;
it is no wonder that the dockyard of Chatham is
to have the sop given it of building an iron ship
which there are no appliances there for building,
nor an official who is competent to superintend one
single stage of the process I It is no wonder that
no officer in the navy who is hoping for promotion
will come forward with the morel courage to speak
out what he thinks—nay, what he knows. It is
left to civilians, to the few who look on these ques-
tions with something of the interest of a scientific
problem, yet at the same time with the gravest ap-
prehensions of the results they may involve, to
speak what they feel upon them, and to speak,
therefore, necessarily in an imperfect way. They
are, and the country will be, deeply indebted to the
press for having taken up this matter, even
though at the eleventh hour.
It is an awful thing that the safety of our com-
merce and the honour of our flag—to say nothing of
our pride as the leading maritime nation—should be
subject to these constant recurrences of jeopardy,
and be only rescued from humiliation by some
happy chance, such, perhaps, as a newspaper editor
becoming suddenly aware of the precipice that may
be close at hand, and of which there may or may
not be time to give due warning. We have one con-
solation. The faults of our Admiralty are not necessa-
rily bcrn of our representativeinstitutions, though a
nation governed by an absolute Monarch with rare
gifts may not be exposed to the disasters arising
from such faults. An Admiralty like ours might
be possible in Austria or Russia, but there is no
free press in those countries to discuss its acts and
to compel them. On the other hand, in each case
in which the French marine has set our dockyards
at work, we have improved on our model just in
the ratio of the mechanical incsenuity involved
in it. If we never beat the Canopus, we long ago
beat the Gomer ; and 'the Warrior, whenever the
company to which the building of her has been in-
cautiously intrusted can complete her, will assu-
redly be a nobler vessel than the Gloire. We have
given the steam engine and the railroad, the tele-
graph, and a thousand arts of peace to France. She
has improved on none of them. She has given us,
it is true, the Jacquard loom. But her other gifts
have been only the implements of aggressive war
—Minie rifles, rifled cannon, models, not of com-
mercial clippers, but of ships of war.
Every one of these we have adopted, or we must
adopt, and it is our own fault if we do not far sur-
pass each and all of them.