favored by position,
or can incline decisively, to one side or the other, the scales in a
doubtful balance. To such misapprehensions we owed, in the early part
of this century, the impressment of hundreds of American seamen, and
the despotic control of our commerce by foreign governments; to this,
the blockading of our coasts, the harrying of the shores of Chesapeake
Bay, the burning of Washington, and a host of less remembered
attendant evils. All these things might have been prevented by the
timely maintenance of a navy of tolerable strength, deterring the
warring powers from wanton outrage.

In the present day the argument that none but the greatest navy is of
any avail, and that such is too expensive for us to contemplate--as it
probably is--is re-enforced by the common statement that the ship
built to-day becomes obsolete in an extremely short time, the period
stated being generally a rhetorical figure rather than an exact
estimate. The word "obsolete" itself is used here vaguely. Strictly,
it means no more than "gone out of use;" but it is understood,
correctly, I think, to mean "become useless." A lady's bonnet may
become obsolete, being gone out of use because no longer in fashion,
though it may still be an adequate head-covering; but an obsolete ship
of war can only be one that is put out of use because it is useless. A
ship momentarily out of use, because not needed, is no more obsolete
than a hat hung up when the owner comes in. When a ship is called
obsolete, therefore, it is meant that she is out of use for the same
reason that many old English words are--because they are no longer
good for their purpose; their meaning being lost to mankind in
general, they no longer serve for the exchange of thought.

In this sense the obsolescence of modern ships of war is just one of
those half-truths which, as Tennyson has it, are ever the worst of
lies; it is harder to meet and fight outright than an unqualified
untruth. It is true that improvement is continually going on in the
various parts of the complex mechanism which constitutes a modern ship
of war; although it is also true that many changes are made which are
not improvements, and that reversion to an earlier type, the
abandonment of a once fancied improvement, is no unprecedented
incident in recent naval architecture and naval ordnance. The
revulsion from the monitor, the turreted ship pure and simple, to the
broadside battery analogous to that carried by th