The Sun.
London, England, 1861-03-29 00:00:00

THE SUN.

LONDON, FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 1861.

If Parliament has (to adopt the familiar but
expressive phrase so often upon the lips of old
JOHN WILLETT'S cronies at the Maypole)" tackled"
anything at all in real earnest in the early part of
this season, it has certainly " tackled" with a right
good will the whole complex question of our Admi-
ralty Administration. With what happy result, yet
remains of course to be seen. But at any rate that
it has " tackled" it, there remains at this mopaent
no doubt whatever. More than one important
committee of inquiry has been suggested. One of
these, the most important of them all, that is to
say, Admiral DUNCOMBE'S, the House of Commons
has even now appointed—as the country knows
full well, and so far as the appointment of
any such committee can go towards the encourage-
ment of such pleasurable feelings, as it knows
moreover with a profound sense of satisfac-
tion. It was only immediately prior to the
adjournment of the Lords and Commons on
the eve of the Easter recess that there was
at length formally laid upon the tables of both
Houses the elaborate report—a report carefully
deliberated, and arranged with admirable lucidity
—giving in the form of a substantial, and, what is
more, of an actually readable Blue Book, the con-
clusions arrived at by, and the copious evi-
dence adduced before, the Royal Commission.
That Commission, which was entrusted by
the Crown with the responsibility of ex-
amining into the nature of the machinery,
and into the condition of the machinery
hitherto peculiar to our dockyard management.
Later on we shall have duly laid before the Legis-
lature in the same way the result of the searching
investigations now about to be commenced by the
members of Admiral DUNCOMBE'S select committee.
Already, meanwhile, there have been an unusual
variety of practical inquiries affecting now this
part, now that part, of our Admiralty administra-
tion, addressed during the present session,in the
Commons, to the noble and gallant Secretary to the
Board of Admiralty, in the Lords, to his Grace the
First of the Six Lords Commissioners entrusted
with the administration of the said department.
Consequently, more and more light has already
poured—more and more light is continually pour-
ing in upon much that was little better previously
than the " darkness visible" at the Board. Of all
the mistakes observable in our present system of
administration, that is now beginning to be very
generally recognised as about the most flagrant and
the most intolerable. It is far more than that,
however—it is obviously, of all, the most perilous.
And as if to signalise this truth in a manner the
most painful, perhaps, that could well be, the
French Republican Naval Committee, appointed as
far back as 1849 by the National Assembly at Paris,
while admitting the immense superiority of England
as compared with France in regard to every essential
element required for maritime power, or, as it should
rather be expressed in our instance, as that first
necessity of our independent existence as a nation,
for maritime supremacy, added emphatically, that
in England " nothing is organised," observing at
the same time as truthfully as sententiously, that
"at sea nothing can be extemporised." This, re-
collect, was the conclusion arrived at now fully a I
dozen years ago by the French Republican Mari-
time Commission. And still England remains
to this hour in regard to the Board of
Admiralty entirely without organisation. And
still that other truth continues, as it
must ever continue, to defy contradiction—
the formidable truth that at sea nothing
can be extemporised. It is a first essential, there-
fore, with us that we should set at once, and
without any further delay whatever, about the all-
important task of securing at last to our maritime
department an appreciable and recognisable re-
sponsibility, a comprehensive and yet minute
system of regular organisation.

At the turn of this current year, upon the very
threshold of 1861, fully one month before the
commencement of the present session of Parlia-
ment, the great Whig Quarterly
,had pronounced
decidedly in favour of the very movement the pro-
gress of which we have during the last eight
weeks been anxiously witnessing. It is a
movement we ourselves have for years and years
zealously advocated in the columns of this journal.
But we particularise the revival of the subject thus
recently and emphatically, as we have said, in the
pages of the Edinburgh, because of the position
occupied by that great organ as the champion or
mouthpiece of the Whig section of the present Coali-
tion Government. A Reviewer, in the number of
the Edinburgh last published, observing that at
page 288, as far back as January, "we are
fully satisfied that no greater service could
be rendered by a Minister to the service
and safety of the country than to reorganise in tote
the department of naval affairs." That is literally,
in one brief but sufficient sentence, the object which
ought at this juncture in the history of our naval
1 department to be held steadily in view by the mem-
bers of Admiral DUNCOMEE'S Select Committee of
Inquiry, and yet more earnestly and sedulously, if
possible, by the whole body of members of the
Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled.
Before the termination of the present session of the
Legislature, Parliament ought certainly to have
put its hand vigorously to the work not simply of
modifying or partially reforming, but of reconstruct-
ing tied reorganising in tote the whole substance
and structure of our maritime department.
During now very nearly 150 years the office of
High Admiral of England has been in Commission
—with the solitary exception of his late MAJESTY'S
brief administration, when H.R.11. the Duke of
CLARENCE—saving in that instance, during that
one short interval, the duties of the office have
devolved during nearly a century and a half upon
a board of half a dozen Commissioners, assisted by
two Secretaries. And it is calculated, moreover,
with a frightful implication of national folly in
every word of this most significant calculation,
that during a given thirty years, say from
1829 to 1859 there were no less than
"seventeen changes in the First Lord of the
an average tenure of office of
Admiralty—giving
about one year ten months and ten weeks" to each
of those Seventeen ! No wonder the Board of
Admiralty, under such a preposterous system as
this, displays at every turn such a total absence of
anything having the semblance of rationale