Fort Wrangel news., 1898-09-14


 the most that any man can hope to do is to keep up with the times From the great. unwieldy woUlen frig;ltes and schooners of the revolutionary period. with their nine and twelve pound guns, and from 5lU to l.HO tons diSpla,r' mcut our navy has progressed to the tyIe of the Iowa. the Indiana and the Oregon. whose mammoth stcel hullls dlSplace l1.9O tons of water and whose terrible ritle-hort7l guns throw metal projectileS weighing l,0n pounds.
 This remarkable evolution Tn naval warfare was not the result of acci- dent II followed In obedience to the theory that nations as individuals, must light the devil with tire;' yea with his own fire. he IL eyer Sn fierce and destructive. Moreover, naval war fare has. as q rule, kept pace with im- provements in the arts. With respect to size and strength. the nayles uf the world have generally taken rank ac- cordlng as their necessities required and the enforcement of their clnims, meritorlous or otherwise, demanded.
 England, with territory upon all of which the sun never sets at one time. has the most formidable navy in the world, and the rest of the world agrees that she needs 1t America, whose acres are contiguous and whose foreign policy has been preSeryative rather than aggressive. has hereto cotIsti4.1 x1-fth ha of the world, trusting to her noninter- ference and the great bodks of salt water to her east and west as a de fense. The apparent incommtahility between the great commercial inter &.StS of the United States and the pov- erty of her national defenses has long been the marvel of Europe, and a great many thinking people of our own coun- try have doubted the policy of trusting too implicitly in natural resour'e-s and natural defenses.
 Comparisons are not always odfouS, but they are usually difficult To com pare the navy of colonial times with the navy of to-day Is like comparing tallow candles with arc lights, stage coaches with modern railway palaces and Fanueil hall with the Chicago Auditorium or Masonic Temple; 1t Is comparing wood with steel. sailing tackle with twin-screw motors and primitive gun powder with brown prismatic," dynamite and nitroglycerin.
 ships of a Past Century.
 It might be noted that in October. 1176, the colonies owned twenty-siX yes sels manning ;36 guns; that the frigate of the revolution was generally forty feet long, propelled by oars and sails, carrying two small guns and a supply of small ordnance; that in 1T9S the navy department was formally organ ized; that in 1906 Congress authorized the construction of 257 wooden war vessels, but finding the scheme too eX- pensiye and the first vessels too un- wieldly abandoned the enterprise; that the Bon Homme Richard, commanded by Paul Jones, carried twenty-eight twelve-pounders on her gun deck, four teen ine-pOunders on her quarter deck and forecastle and q total armament of forty-two guns, but these facts and fig ures give little insight into the real sit uation of the early days and afford no criterion whatever for comparison with Rear Admiral Sampson's fleet in the West Indies.
 A review of the early history of the American navy does not require, there fore, that the student go back farther than the beginning of the present cen tury, when steam was first applied to the propulsion of vessels. Passing by the discussion as to whether Fulton was in fact the first man who applied steam as a motor for ships, suffice 1t to say that in 1914 he proposed to build n ''fioating battery for the defense of New York harbor, Q vessel to be pro