Expert opinion confirmed the wisdom of the government policy. Experience, in the Franco-Prussian war and elsewhere, confirmed the views of the experts. “Reviewing the action of the artillerists who decided to adopt muzzle-loaders, with the greater experience we now possess it seems that they were right in their decision at the time it was first made; but there was too much hesitation in coming back to breech-loaders when new discoveries and great progress in powder quite altered conditions.”[130] In fact, once having abandoned the disparaged system, the country was with difficulty persuaded by the professionals to retrace its steps. In the end, ordnance followed small arms; the researches of Captain Noble at Elswick proved conclusively to the world at large the necessity for a reversion to breech-loading; and in 1880 the muzzle-loading gun was finally superseded by a greatly improved form of breech-loader. In 1880 the state of knowledge and the conditions under which ordnance was manufactured were certainly altered from those of ’64. The struggle between guns and armour begun with the _Gloire_ and _Warrior_ had continued. In the presence of the new powers of mechanical science, artillerists and shipbuilders had sought to plumb the possibilities of offensive and defensive elements in warship design. Guns influenced armour, armour reacted on guns; both revolutionized contemporary naval architecture. It was in the effort to aggrandize the power of guns that Noble discovered that, with the existing powders and with the short muzzle-loading gun, a natural limit of power was soon reached. Better results could only be obtained, he showed, by the adoption of slow-burning powder and a longer gun; by the avoidance of the sudden high chamber pressure which resulted from the small-grained powder, and the substitution for it of a chamber pressure which would rise gradually to a safe maximum and then suffer only a gradual reduction as the gases expanded behind the moving projectile. The work done by the gases on the projectile could by this means be enormously increased. But, for this result, larger powder-charges were required; and these larger charges of slow-burning powder were found to require much larger chambers than those embodied in existing guns; in short, the new conditions called for a new shape of gun. Long guns, having powder chambers of larger diameter than that of the bore, were necessary, and these could not conveniently be made muzzle-loading.