ould reform the art of war according
to the axioms of Herr Duehring would only get a flogging for his
pains.

If we go from the land to the sea we shall discover a complete
revolution, even within the last twenty years. The warship of the
Crimean War was the wooden three decker, with from sixty to a hundred
guns, which depended upon its sailing power and had only a weak
auxiliary steam engine. It carried in general thirty-two pounders of
about sixty hundred weight and only a few sixty-eight pounders of
ninety-five hundred weight. At the end of the war ironclad floating
batteries were used, clumsy and slow but impregnable to the artillery
of that time. Very soon iron plates were placed on the warships, at
first thin, four inches thickness of iron was then considered to
constitute a remarkably great thickness. But the progress in artillery
soon discounted the thickness of armour, for every addition to the
armour there was a new and more powerful artillery which pierced it
with the greatest ease. So now we have warships with ten, twelve,
fourteen, twenty-four inches of armour plate (the Italians are going
to build a warship with armourplate three feet thick) on the one hand
and on the other hand guns which reach to a hundred tons and which
hurl projectiles amounting to two thousand pounds in weight to unheard
of distances. The modern war vessel is a rapid travelling armoured
screw steamer of eight to ten thousand tons and of from six to eight
thousand horse power provided with turrets and four or six very
powerful big guns, together with a ram at the bow below the water line
for the purpose of destroying the ship of the enemy. It is a colossal
machine in which steam not only furnishes the driving power but also
steers, raises the anchor, moves the towers, aims and loads the guns,
works the pumps, takes in and lowers the boats, which are frequently
steamers, and so forth. And the contest between the armour plate and
the projectile is so far from having been settled that a ship is
to-day practically obsolete as soon as it has left the ways. The
modern warship is not only a product of modern industry but a
masterpiece, a product of the dissipation of wealth. The country in
which the greater industry has developed the most completely has a
monopoly of shipbuilding. All the Turkish, almost all the Russian and
the greater part of the German warships are built in England. Armour
plate of the best type is made almost exclusively