resented in speed and coal
endurance, is the chief requisite. Notwithstanding occasional
aberrations in the past, the development of the cruiser classes may be
safely entrusted by the public to the technical experts; provided it
be left to naval officers, military men, to say what qualities should
predominate. Moreover, as such vessels generally act singly, it is of
less importance that they vary much in type, and the need of
subdivision carries with it that of numerous sizes; but battleships,
including armored cruisers, are meant to work together, and insistence
should be made upon homogeneousness, especially in manoeuvring
qualities.

To sum up: the attention of the public should be centred upon the
armored fleet, to which the bulk of expenditure should be devoted; the
monitor, pure and simple,--save for very exceptional uses,--should be
eliminated; the development of the true cruiser,--not armored,--both
in type and in numbers, does not require great interest of the
public; much of the duties of this class, also, can be discharged
fairly well by purchased vessels, although such will never have the
proportion of fighting power which every type of ship of war should
possess. As a rule, it is undesirable that a military force, land or
sea, should have to retreat before one of equal size, as auxiliary
cruisers often would.

CURRENT FALLACIES UPON NAVAL SUBJECTS

CURRENT FALLACIES UPON NAVAL SUBJECTS

All matters connected with the sea tend to have, in a greater or less
degree, a distinctly specialized character, due to the unfamiliarity
which the sea, as a scene of _action_, has for the mass of mankind.
Nothing is more trite than the remark continually made to naval
officers, that life at sea must give them a great deal of leisure for
reading and other forms of personal culture. Without going so far as
to say that there is no more leisure in a naval officer's life than in
some other pursuits--social engagements, for instance, are largely
eliminated when at sea--there is very much less than persons imagine;
and what there is is broken up by numerous petty duties and incidents,
of which people living on shore have no conception, because they have
no experience. It is evident that the remark proceeds in most cases
from the speaker's own consciousness of the unoccupied monotony of an
ocean passage, in which, unless exceptionally observant, he has not
even detected the many small but essential functions dis