Thickest Displacement. Guns. Speed. Armour. Cost. _Orion_ 22,300 Ten 13·5 in. 21 knots 12 in. £1,900,000 _Lion_ 26,350 Eight 13·5 in. 28 knots 10 in. 2,100,000 Thus it will be seen that of these two contemporary ships the battle-cruiser is the bigger, cost £200,000 more, has two less big guns, 2 inches less protection, but steams at least 7 knots faster than the battleship. Indeed, it is hard to say whether she is or is not, on the whole, the more useful ship, even as a battleship. The Admiralty and naval constructors would seem to incline to this opinion, for, as we have seen in the latest battleship--the _Queen Elizabeth_--two guns have been sacrificed for the sake of 4 knots more speed than the _Orion_. The cruiser-battleship or battle-cruiser, then, not only has almost precisely the same appearance as a battleship, though probably of rather greater length, but has special battle duties as well as cruiser duties. Thus, if working with battleships, it is her business to pursue an enemy's battle squadron in retreat, and, by bringing its rearmost ships to action, try to induce their consorts to stand by them till her own slower but more powerfully gunned consorts can come up and take a hand. As for her cruising duties, we have had conspicuous examples during the course of the war, both as to the right and wrong way of such ships' employment. The unexpected and opportune intervention of the _Inflexible_ and _Invincible_ in the Falkland Islands battle, whose mere appearance convinced von Spee that his "game was up"; and the way in which Sir David Beatty was "on the spot" and swooped down on the German North Sea raiders, are both excellent examples of the way these formidable fighting-cruisers should be used. If you want to see "how not to do it" you have only got to consider the misuse of the _Goeben_ in the Mediterranean, where, after a useless bombardment of one or two not very important Algerian towns, she fled for shelter to the Dardanelles, instead of trying to break out into the Atlantic. It is claimed, of course, that, but for her appearance at Constantinople, Turkey would not have been drawn into the war on the side of Germany, but it is hard to believe that the long-pursued German intrigues in Turkey would have all gone for nothing without the arrival of the somewhat discredited _Goeben_. Nor was the use of battle-cruisers to bombard a few defenceless coast towns a sound method of strategy. As it was, they were within an ace of being lost--and for what result? Absolutely _nil_ from a military point of view. The battle-cruiser has a great future before it, and it does not seem unlikely that, now that the enormous advantages of high speed have been so clearly demonstrated, it will altogether supersede the slower and heavier armed and armoured battleship proper.