BATTLE-SHIPS THAT ARE TOO LARGE
The battle-ship constituted as described remains for the present the fighting ship upon which the issues of war will depend. The type is accepted by all the leading naval states, though with considerable variations in size. As regards the latter feature, the writer believes that the enormous tonnage recently given is excessive, and that the reasons which support it, too numerous and various to be enumerated at length, have the following fundamental fault: they look too much to the development of the individual ship and too little to the fact that the prime requisite of the battle-ship is facility for co-operating with other ships of its own type—facility in manœuvring together, facility in massing, facility also in subdividing when occasion demands. It may be remarked, too, that the increase of size has gone much more to increase of defensive power than of offensive—a result so contrary to the universal teachings of war as of itself to suggest pausing.
Does the present hold out any probabilities of important changes in the near future, of revolutionary changes? No. For twenty-five or thirty years now we have been expecting from the ram and from the torpedo results which would displace the gun from its supremacy of centuries. Those results, however, are not yet visible. No one disputes the tremendous effects of the ram and of the torpedo when successfully used; but I believe I am correct in saying that the great preponderance of professional opinion does not attribute to them a certainty, or an approach to certainty, impairing the predominance of the gun. This is not the conclusion of mere conservation in a profession naturally conservative. The fluctuations of professional opinion have been sufficiently marked and the matter sufficiently argued to dispose of that contention. Nor is this supremacy of the gun probably a transient matter, liable to pass away with improvements greater than those of the last quarter of a century. The advantage of the gun depends upon conditions probably permanent—upon its greater range, its greater accuracy, its greater rapidity. The individual effect of each shot may be less than that of a torpedo or of a ram thrust; but, as was said in comparing very heavy guns with rapid fire, the probability of many hits prevails over the possibilities of one great blow.