It is very distressing to have to write in these terms, and put these questions about Admiralty representatives and Admiralty ships; but what is to be done? Here are two ships which are together to cost nearly half a million of money, which are expressly built to chase and capture our enemies in distant seas, which are vauntingly described as “armored cruisers,” which cannot be expected always by their mere appearance to frighten the enemy into submission, like painted Chinese forts, which must be presumed sometimes to encounter a fighting foe, or at least to be fired at a few times by the stern guns of a vessel that is running away, and yet some eighty or ninety feet of the bows of these ships, and as much of their sterns, are deliberately deprived of the protection of armor, so that any shell from any gun may pierce them, let in the sea, and reduce their speed indefinitely; and in apparent justification of this perfectly ridiculous arrangement—perfectly ridiculous in a ship which is primarily bound to sustain her speed when chasing—a late Secretary to the Admiralty tells us that she is to carry in the unprotected bow some coals! May my hope formerly expressed in _Harper’s Magazine_ find its fruition by giving to the British Admiralty a piece of information of which it only can be possibly ignorant, _viz._, that even while coal is unconsumed, it differs largely from steel armor-plates in the measure of resistance which it offers to shot and shell; and further, that coal is put on board war-ships that it may be consumed in the generation of steam? It is very desirable that this information should somehow be conveyed to Whitehall in an impressive manner, and possibly, if the combined intelligence of the two great nations to which Harpers’ publications chiefly appeal be invoked in its favor, it may at length be understood and attended to even by the Admiralty, and one may hear no more of the protection of her Majesty’s ships by means of their “coal.” [Illustration: THE “WARSPITE.”] [Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTION OF THE “MERSEY.”]