The Sun.
London, England, 1861-03-01 00:00:00

remembering how egregious is the anomaly pre-
sented to view by the Board of Admiralty
as at present constructed. The curiosity
felt by little OLIVER TWIST, in his
early childhood as to what a " Board" could pos-
sibly be, may, in simple truth, be only likened in
its intensity to the marvel of any rational adult
in these islands when he comprehends fully what
the particular Board referred to last evening by
the hon. Baronet, the member for Portsmouth,
in his bold and comprehensive resolutions,
really and actually is. Boards might, by the
cynical philosophers of our day, by critics like
CARLYLE for example, be generally defined
as —,what their names might almost seem
to suggest etymologically—things essentially
wooden-headed ! But the Board of Admiralty—
the Board especially set apart with a view to the
better construction and preservation of the wooden
walls of Old England ! That Board in particular
might, without much exaggeration, be especially
designated as in this way facile princeps among all
the various Boards familiar to Englishmen. It is
no such exceeding wonder, therefore, after all,
it is not in any way so excessively marvel-
lous, recollecting the past history of this
amazing Board of Admiralty, to find a mem-
ber of the House of Commons like Sir J. ELPIIIN-
STONE propounding to the House a distinct plan
for its abolition and for its replacement by some
totally different scheme of adrainistration. The
resolutions of the hon. member for Portsmouth,
numbering in all " eleven," proposed, among other
daring schemes of a reconstructive character,
to secure, as the first essential for the good ad-
ministration of the Royal Navy henceforth, that
personal responsibility which is wholly awanting
in our present Board of Admiralty, composed of
professional and unprofessional Lords Commis-
sioners. According to Sir J. ELPIIINSTONE'S plan,
and as the readiest means of ensuring this guarantee
of good government henceforth in our maritime
department, there might be substituted for the
Board of Admiralty a Minister of Marine, with a
Secretary of the department, chosen from among
the number of the popular representatives. Pos-
sibly—probably indeed—we may in the fulness of
time obtain this Minister of Marine, as well as our
long talked of and long hoped for Minister of
Justice. But in the meantime, before any such
sweeping measure of reconstruction or absolute
transformation can be seriously thought of or de-
cided upon by the Legislature—there are changes,
modifications, improvements of the most various
kind being perpetually introduced at the Admi-
ralty by the mere pressure of events, by the mere
necessity of the times, by means of which many of the
more flagrant anomalies of the Board are rendered,
to a considerable extent, innocuous : those benefi-
cent changes, modifications, and improvements
happily taking place simultaneously with another
and more material " Reconstruction of the Navy"
—a reconstruction brought about in the
dockyards of Old England by the hammer
and the adze of her shipwrights. Those
who may chance to be still in doubt as to the
extent of the good progress already made, and still
resolutely making, at the Admiralty and in the
dockyards of this country with a view to the
reconstruction and rehabilitation in a very great
measure of the whole soul and body of our Maritime
Power, will do well to turn for a moment to the
frank, sailor-like words addressed last evening to
the British House of Commons by the noble and
gallant lord, the Admiralty Secretary. It will be
there seen how cheerily, and with what infinite
good humour Lord CLARENCE PAGET snaps his
fingers in the pale face of the Alarmist.

The launch of the Black Prince reminds us that
the wooden walls of old England are becoming
matter of history. We must remember them only
with an antiquarian sigh. Through their good
help we have continued to enjoy immunity from
conquest, and from anything like serious invasion
for eight hundred years, and the want of them

was the cause of successful invasion in earlier days.
We must now, however, drink to the memory of
our wooden walls, and with all convenient speed
ensconce ourselves behind our iron walls. Heart
of oak has been hitherto unsurpassed, but heart of
iron is certainly better ; and be it remembered, if
oak be British, iron is pre-eminently so. No
country in the world is such an iron country
as ours. Nowhere else do the iron ores,
and the coals which convert them into
iron, lie in such close proximity ; nowhere else
do the requisite capital and the n amber of

skilled mechanics and adjacency of water render
so facile the building and the launching of the

argent iron fabrics.

Our readers will peruse with interest the account
of the Black Prince, launched at Glasgow last
Wednesday—the sister ship in almost every re-
spect to the Warrior. They will be the more in-
terested if they remember that these must
be the future models, only, of course,
improving on them, of our Nevy. It may
be, and it is mortifying, that after the enor-
mous expense we have incurred for the new navy
which Sir JOHN PAKINGTON began to build, we
should now
.be called on to build a new iron fleet
in its place; but there is no help for it. The
great change has taken place. It has become as
certain that a fleet of wooden ships could be
destroyed almost with impunity by a fleet of iron
ones, as that a fleet of old sailing vessels would
have been at the mercy of a fleet of screw steamers.

The wooden ships will also still be of use for a long

time to come, where they will not be matched
against iron ; but they will no longer be our
reliance on our own coasts and in the Mediterranean.

It is possible, too, that some of the wooden ships
will be capable of bearing a covering, more or less,
of iron plates, and serve in our ports as blockships.
It will, however, be observed that two such practical
men as Mr. LINDSAY and Sir MORTON PETO both
declared the day of wooden ships of war to be over,
and agree on the necessity of replacing them by
iron ones as speedily as possible. One very con-
solatory view of the matter was given by Sir M.
PETO; that ultimately iron ships would be the
more economical. And he would seem to be right
—for, as he observed, an iron ship was as good fifty
years after she was built as ever; he knew from
experience that the wear of iron under such cir-
cumstances was scarcely appreciable. It is cer_
tainly not subject to dry rot or any of the other ills
that timber is heir to—while we know but too well

that a wooden ship is soon out of repair. In 1859,
Uir B. WALKER reported that there was scarcely a
ship, unless she had been built recently, that could
go to sea without " extensive repairs."
Sir MORTON PETO laid his finger on the cause of

the evil—that of persevering in building wooden
ships after the only nation with whom we can come
into competition had ceased to build them—when
he told the Government that they did not act like
men of business. The latter would not think of
going on building and spending on an antiquated
and exploded system, but the Government had got
its dockyards all arranged !for building with wood,
its mechanics all trained to work in it ; and if the
Government constructed iron vessels their occupa-
tion would be gone—but this was not to be a reason
why the millions of the country were to be waged,