In France development was stopped for a time by the war, but recommenced in 1875, when the Alma type was perfected in the Victorieuse, and the Redoubtable and Duperré commenced a new departure. Their coast-defence vessels were also remodelled, following closely the ideas expressed in the Glatton, improving on her in the Tonnerre type.
In Italy independent action appears in the new cruising types Venezia and Palestro, and her architects rightly claim half the honor of the last development of turreted vessels. Whether to Italy or to England belongs exclusively the Duilio and Inflexible type is a question that probably will never be satisfactorily answered.
Austria develops independently the Custoza and the Tegetthoff.
Russia makes a false development in the Popoffkas, and a true one in the Duke of Edinburgh.
Germany carries the Monarch development to its highest point in the Preussen, and the Redoubtable development in the Kaiser.
Chili, with the help of England, produces a new and true type in the Almirante Cochrane, and Japan and Portugal each appear with a well-designed reduction of the Redoubtable in the Foo Soo and the Vasco da Gama.
In this rush of development of twenty years it is true that all fleets have been immeasurably strengthened, but it has been at a cost far beyond what the result would warrant. It is only within the past five years that the development of iron-clad architecture can be said to have taken any steady course. As yet the full effects of this forced and feverish course can scarcely be realized; but as fleets grow now slowly and steadily, those nations who have waited a little and profited by the true developments of the more hasty ones will be in a far better position to meet the sudden exigencies of war than those who have counted on numbers of vessels and gross tonnage displacement as a true criterion of naval strength. From the number of cautious nations the United States must be excluded, since in this country the blow given to the development of private ship-building by the civil war and to the development of naval architecture by political intrigue and interference has resulted in the nearly complete destruction of the science itself.
Nothing is more common amongst naval people than speculations and arguments with regard to the true methods of developing a fleet, and it is generally taken for granted amongst those who give the subject but a superficial study that, since the designs that have been created are almost countless in their variety, and that amongst those nations that have attempted an independent development there is not one that does not count as many failures as successes, the matter of design is one of pure guess-work, not stopping to think that, as a rule, the designers themselves are men of the highest abilities, and that with a ship, as with everything else, there are certain limiting circumstances that the nature of the vessel itself forbids violating.
In this respect a comparison of the proportions of the different elements of vessels of varying types affords a useful lesson.
RATIOS OF THE PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS
OF IRON-CLAD VESSELS TO
THEIR DISPLACEMENT.