Blandford Weekly News. — 1886-04-10 (Blandford, Dorset, England)

ARMED MERCHANT VESSELS. At a meeting of the Royal United service Institudon, Lieutenant William C. Crutch R.N.R., has read a paper in which he advocated the arming of merchant vessels. Assuming that ale power of waging war upon the seas depended firstly on the quality and extent of the mercantile mains in ships and men, provided that the national kie in both was real and firm, he said that then would be little doubt al to our maritime superiority but on the other hand their were a vast numb, r of cmpotent authorities who maintained that out enornious Beet of merchantinen was our most ti ilnerable point, and that thus in our strength lay our weak. nose. A great number of our faster vessels, how4)V er , were an absolute source of streneb, provided that care were taken in peace time to place them in a condition to be servic able on the sudden outbreak of war. It was no new scheme tbst he advocated, it was simply a return to the old fashion of arming merchantmen to enable them to take care of themselves, but with this difference, that :id years ago the shipowners found the arms, as freigl ta were good and arms were inexpensive. These latter conditions now having been reversed, it wouh' devolve upon the Goveinment to supply weapons if merchantmen were to be armed for the protection of their own commerce. He thought that were these vessels supplied with a moderate armament they would be stile to give a kir account of themselves to any of the scratch pack that at the first outbreak of war would be most likely to attempt their capture and subsequent conversion ; for if ever we were called upon to fight for our maritime supremacy, our men-of-oar would be fully employed looking after the battle ships of the enemy, and their fast-armed nierchantrnen would, for some time at least, be able to harass our commerce seriously, lie did not see there was ally reason why an officer commanding a mail steamer should not be able to sail his ship in the piping times of peace and fight her as well as another man if it came to war, The more he looked at the question in all its bearings the more convinced he felt that the arming of fist merchantmen for long voyages would sooner or later become an absolute necessity. Even supposing that one or two armed merchantmen were sunk, they would have inflicted some proportionate amount of damage on their conqueror, and to disable even one hostile ship would mean to us far more than the less of six of our own. In the course of the discussion which followed, Mr. N. Baden-Powell expressed the opinion that any merchantman, armed as the lecturer had described, would be a privateer by the declaration of Paris, and that being so no men could be got to serve on them. He looked with distrust upon the employment of armed mer. chantmen in time of war.—Sr Nathaniel Barnaby observed that the question was whether by any conceivable arrangement we could wake the ship owner secure in not having his vessels snapped up. He thought not, and until we had the question considered exhaustively and deliberately they would never obtain any solution of it.  Edward Saunders, who was a gamekeeper in the service of Lord Ehury, Moor Park, died recently, leaving his wife with a large family of young children to support. This fact preyed on the mind of one of the boys, 15 years of age, and he has just committed suicide by hanging himself to a tree,