e old ships of
Farragut and Nelson, is one of the most singular and interesting
changes in men's thoughts that the writer has met, either in his
experience or in his professional reading. The day can be recalled
when the broadside battleship was considered as dead as
Cock-Robin--her knell was rung, and herself buried without honors;
yet, not only has she revived, but I imagine that I should have a very
respectable following among naval officers now in believing, as I do,
that the broadside guns, and not those in the turrets, are the primary
battery of the ship--primary, I mean, in fighting value. Whatever the
worth of this opinion,--which is immaterial to the present
contention,--a change so radical as from broadside battery to turreted
ships, and from the latter back to broadside, though without entirely
giving up turrets, should cause some reasonable hesitancy in imputing
obsoleteness to any armored steamship. The present battleship
reproduces, in essential principles, the ships that preceded the
epoch-making monitor--the pivot guns of the earlier vessels being
represented by the present turrets, and their broadsides by the
present broadside. The prevalence of the monitor type was an
interlude, powerfully affecting the development of navies, but making
nothing obsolete. It did not effect a revolution, but a
modification--much as homoeopathy did in the "regular practice."

There is, of course, a line on one side of which the term "obsolete"
applies, but it may be said that no ship is obsolete for which
fighting-work can be found, with a tolerable chance--a fighting
chance--of her being successful; because, though unequal to this or
that position of exposure, she, by occupying an inferior one, releases
a better ship. And here again we must guard ourselves from thinking
that inferior force--inferior in number or inferior in quality--has
_no_ chance against a superior. The idea is simply another phase of "a
navy equal to the greatest," another military heresy. A ship under the
guns of one thrice her force, from which her speed cannot carry her,
is doubtless a lost ship. She may be called even obsolete, though she
be the last product of naval science, just from a dock-yard. Before
such extreme conditions are reached, however, by a ship or a fleet,
many other factors than merely relative force come into play;
primarily, man, with all that his personality implies--skill,
courage, discipline,--after that, chance, opportunity