So much for the battleship. But here is a ship appearing as large and important as any battleship. It is a first-class armoured cruiser. Her engines are, it anything, even more powerful than those of a battleship. She carries more coal and can keep the sea for a longer time without returning to port, but her guns are not quite so powerful as those of a battleship, nor is her armour quite so thick. There are other cruisers, somewhat less powerful than armoured cruisers, which are said to be protected, because they carry less defence against shot, and there are still others known as scouts, whose name reveals their special purpose. Now what is the object of these cruisers? This is an important question, because the British Navy contains more cruisers of one kind and another than battleships, and yet victory in battle is determined by strength of battleships more than of cruisers. The first object of a cruiser is to obtain intelligence for the battleships. Although a battleship can move fast, yet she cannot move so fast as ships that have not to bear such vast weights. The cruisers find out for the battleships what is going on in seas around, and whether the enemy is near. Of course they must be prepared to fight the enemy’s cruisers, and to prevent them from approaching to gain information for their own admiral. In these days cruisers communicate with the battle-fleets by wireless telegraphy, and by acting together, so that a message is taken up and passed on by successive ships, an immense area of sea may be covered, and even the distant position of the enemy’s fleet may be ascertained. But the cruisers have also another function, which is to defend commerce. Here again you must not measure the protection given to our commerce by the frequency with which you see our cruisers. In time of war it would not as a rule be the duty of cruisers to accompany or, as a phrase is, to convoy our merchant ships from port to port. You will remember that we have 9,000 ocean-going steamers, and we should have to build an immense and costly fleet of cruisers, if we were going to protect them all by the method of convoy. Let us try to understand the action of cruisers by comparing them to policemen upon the land. In almost every community there are a certain number of thieves, who from time to time break into houses and steal, but we do not protect our houses by having a policeman always on guard in each. Our method is to detect the thieves and to arrest them. In other words, our aim is not so much to defend our houses from robbery, as to remove the thieves from society. Precisely in the same way our cruisers would not so much defend our merchantmen, as hunt down and destroy the cruisers of the enemy who broke the peace of the ocean. Our aim would be so to clear the water of hostile cruisers that our liners might steam with the same regularity and certainty in time of war as in time of peace. [Sidenote: 5. First-class Destroyer. H.M.S. “Derwent.”]