Morning journal and courier., 1886-01-15


 rangement of drapery and delineation of form, and by fiat and vivid colors bounded by strong outline.
 In strolling round the studio it would be- indeed, impossible to complain of weariness, for witnesses to the versatility of MT. Cranes talent are everywhere apparent. Outside art circles, MT. Crane is best known an illus trator by reason of the wide diffusion which the printing press affords-the woodcut, however, very inadequately reproducing the purity of outline and the minuteness and del icacy of touch which characterize MT. Cranes original drawings. As to his toy books, they are, for the most part, the produce of his leisure time, and they bear the impress of the character of the more serious work on which the artist at the time may be engaged, and thus manifest occasionally considerable diver gence in treatment; but in all of these the object of his art is to address childrens inn agination, and, while entertaining, his work never once loses grace.
 Condition of the British Navy. LSir Edward Reed in Harper's Magazine for Feb
 ruaryl
 The British navy, having very diversified services to perform during both peace and war, requires ships of various kinds and sizes. Its first and greatest requirement of all is that of l1ne-of- battle ships in sufficient numbers to enable England to stand up sue cessfully against any European naval force or forces that may threaten her or her emp pire. If anyone should be disposed to ask why this requirement. which is obviously an ex- treme one and an impossible one for more than single power-is more necessary for England than any other country, the answer must be, Circumspice! To look round over England's empire is to see why her failure on the sea would be her failure altogether. France, Germany, Italy. and even Holland might each get along fairly well, losing noth- ing that is absolutely essential to their ex- istence, even if every port belonging to them were sealed by an enemy's squadron. But were Great Britain to be cut off from her colonies and dependencies, were her ships to be swept from the seas and her ports closed by hostile squadrons, she would either be deprived of the very elements of life itself, or would have to seek from the compassion of her foes the bare means of existence. It is this consideration and the strong parental care which she feels for her colonies, that makes her sons indignant at any hazardous reduction of her naval strength. There are even in England itself men who cannot or will not see this danger, and who impute to those who strive to avert it ambitious, selfish and even sordid motives. But it is to no unworthy cause that England's naval anxie- ties are due. We have no desire for war; we do not hunger for further naval fame; we cherish no mean rivalry of other powers who seek to coloniZe or to otherwise improve their trade; we do not want the mastery Of the seas for any commercial objects that are exclusively our own. What we desire to do is to keep the seas open thoroughfares to our vast possessions and dependencies, and free to that commercial communication which has become indispensable to our existence as an empire. To accomplish that object we must, at any cost, bs strong, supremely strong, in European waters; and it is for this reason that England's line-of-battle ships ought to be always above suspicion both ill number and in quality.
 It is not pleasant assertion for an Eng lishman to make when he has to say that this is very far from being the case at pres ent A few months ago this statement, from whomsoever it emanated, would have been received with distrust by the general public, for the truth was only known to the navy it. self and to comparatively few outsiders. But the official communications made to both houses of Parliament early in December last have prepared the world for the truth the First Lord of the Admiralty in the Chamber of Peers and Sir Thomas Brassey in the House of Commons having then pro posed to Parliament a programme of addi- tional shipbuilding which provided for a considerable increase in the number of it's Grst-cIass ships and cruisers, and which also provided, on the demand of the present wri- ter, that the cruisers should be protected with belts of armor-an element of safety previously denied to them. It need hardly be repeated, after this wholesale admission of weakness by the admiralty, that Great Britain is at present in far from satisfacto- " condition as regards both the number and the character of it's ships. Were that not so no public agitation could have moved the government to reverse in several respects a policy by which it had for so long abided.
 | L.... ( ly review the causes of the present deplora- ble condition of the British navy. In the first place, in so as it is a financial ques- tion, it has resulted mainly from the sus taiued attempt of successive governments to keep the naval expenditure within or near to fixed annual amount, notwithstanding the palpable fact that every branch of the naval service, like most other services, is unavoid ably increasing in cost, while the necessities of the empire are likewise unavoidably in- creasing. The consequence is that, as officers and men of every description must be paid, and all the charges connected herewith must in any event be fully met, the ship building votes of various kinds are those upon which the main stress of financial pressure must fall From this follows q strong desire, to which all boards of admi- ralty too readily yield, to keep down the size and cost of their first-class ships, to the sac- rifice of their necessary qualities. This may be strikingly illustrated by the fact that, al though the iron Dreadnought, first-class ship, designed fifteen or sixteen years ago, had a displacement of 1920 tons, and was powerful in proportion. the admiralty have launched but single ship (the Infexible) since that period of which the displacement has reached t n thousand tons In fact, every large ironclad ship for the British navy since launched has fallen from 1 200 to ?, 400 tons short of the Dreadnought's dis Iao, o,fio l1x- ble.
 If this cutting down in the size of the principal ships of Great Britain had been at tended by corresponding reduction in the sizes of the ships of other powers, or even by some advantages of design which largely tended to make up for the defect of size, there might be something to say for it. But the French ships have shown no such falling off in size, and have benefited as fully as the English ships by the of ste l and by the improved power and economy of the marine steam engine.
 Simultaneously with the reduction in the size of the English ships there has been brought about-volpntarily, and not a consequence of reduced size, for it was first applied in the largest of all British men-of- war, the Infiexible-a system of stripping the so-called armored ships of the English navy of large part of their arnor, and re- ducing its extent to so deplorable degree that, as has already been sad, they are quite unfit to take part, with any reasonable hope of success, in any general engagement. Here, again, there might have been some thing to say for large reduction in the ar mored surface of ships if it had been attend ed by some great compensation, such that which an immense increase in the thickness of the armor applied might have provided, although no such increase could ever havs compensated for such reduction Of the ar rored part of the ship as would have ex- posed the whole ship to destruction by the mere bursting in of the unarmored ends, which is what has been done, But although in the case of the large 1nffexible the citadel armor was of excessive thickness, that is not true of the more recent ships of England, the armor of which sometimes falls short of that of the French ships, in two or three in stances by as much as four inches, the French ships having twenty-two-inch armor and the English eighteen inch. But by the combined effect of injudicious economy and of erroneous design, therefore-both far= thered by sort of frenzied 9aSire the of +Lo p,i4 +o