Why so much money produced such unsatisfactory results was well shown in the course of a discussion in the Commons on the 13th January of this year. Mr. Temple Luttrell quoted figures to show that as much had been voted for the repairs of the =Namur=, the =Defence=, and the =Arrogant=, as would have built them new from the keel at the most extravagant rate. Yet they were not fit for service. An even more scandalous case was that of the =Dragon=, 74. She had been launched in 1760 in the heat of the Seven Years’ War, and was one of the vessels then hastily constructed of green timber to meet a pressing need. They were rotten by 1771, and Sandwich was in the habit of taking credit to himself for his exertion to replace them by better ships. What had happened with the =Dragon= was this—that between 1771 and 1778 the Admiralty came to Parliament for successive sums, amounting to £27,000, for her repairs, and £10,273 for her stores. Yet in the latter year she was notoriously lying in a rotten state at the head of Portsmouth Harbour, and not one penny of this money had ever been spent upon her. The facts were not disputed. All that the Sea Lords, who answered for the Admiralty, could say was, that they had not pilfered the money themselves, and that this sort of thing had always been done. The answer was, that it was directly contrary to the representation of the House of Commons in 1711. It was on this occasion that Burke threw the book of the estimates across the Speaker’s table, knocking over a candle, and all but breaking the shins of the Treasurer of the Navy, Welbore Ellis. He said, that it was “treating the House with the utmost contempt, to present them with a fine gilt book of estimates, calculated to the last farthing, for purposes to which the money granted was never meant to be applied.” Burke was right, but the Whig Opposition had done nothing to amend the evil in its days of power, and had little right to take a lofty moral line with its successors. Contempt was the exact word for the attitude taken towards all criticism by Sir Hugh Palliser and Lord Mulgrave, the naval representatives of the Admiralty in the Lower House. Palliser was arrogant and laconic, lying as to the state of the fleet with a burly assurance. Lord Mulgrave, the Irish peer, better remembered as the Captain Constantine Phipps, with whom Nelson made his early voyage to Spitzbergen, was fluent, jocular, and insolent. A docile majority supported them by voting “the previous question” as the most convenient way of stifling inquiry.