The guns are placed, two and two, in turrets on the battle-ships, and can be turned in any direction; if need be they can fire a whole broadside; while, as two turrets are elevated above the rest, a volley can be fired of four guns direct from the bow or stern. The turrets are armored with tough hard steel and their surface is curved so that a shot will glance off. The _King_ and the _Kaiser_ classes carry ten great guns, the _Helgoland_ and _Nassau_ classes even twelve, but the latter are no more effective, as they have not the two elevated turrets for shooting over the other guns. Some of the new French and American ships are to have three and even four guns to a turret, but the German navy is conservative enough not to wish to try the experiment. Theoretically at least a great dreadnaught is almost unsinkable. Not only is its hull divided into a great number of cells and compartments but many of the cells themselves are armored, so that even if a torpedo penetrates to them it will not have things all its own way. All vulnerable places, too, are heavily armored with plates that extend away below the water line; while the powder magazines and torpedo tubes are well down in the depths of the ship. It is the heavy armament that has conditioned the size of the ships, for they have few other advantages than the ability to carry the extra weight, and they have increased the cost of navies enormously. The appropriations of eight great powers for 1914-1915 come to not far from three billion five hundred million marks, England leading with more than one billion. And the expenses do not cease with the building of the ships, for docks, dry docks, canals, etc., have to be enlarged accordingly. The Kaiser Wilhelm canal, built between the years 1887 and 1895, at a cost of one hundred fifty-six million marks, had already outgrown its usefulness ten years after its opening. Its widening, which will not be fully completed until 1915, is to cost two hundred twenty-three millions in addition. We have thus far spoken only of ships of the line, and, although we shall have to return to them in a moment, a few words must first be said as to the use of the other categories of ships in actual warfare. Armored cruisers in themselves are nothing new. England has forty-four of them, France nineteen, Japan fifteen and Germany and the United States each fourteen. But _great armored battle-cruisers_ have existed only since 1907 and are possessed as yet by only three powers: England has ten; Germany has, or had, five (for the _Goeben_ is out of the running), and Japan has two.