The _Atlanta_ and _Boston_ were good fourteen-knot cruisers, but there were faster boats, armed with guns as good as theirs, in Europe. American policy could not permit such a state of affairs to exist, and we designed larger and better ones than anything afloat. We laid down the _New York_. She cost “a whole lot of money,” it is true, but as we recall the thrill that stirred the nation when the story of her trial trip was told--when it was told that we had the swiftest and most powerful cruiser in the world, we are bound to say that twice the sum invested in any other way by the government could not have given the nation so great a benefit. It was not that any one was incited to a point where he wished the nation to go to war. On the contrary, the _New York_ was an assurance that in our dealings with other peoples we would “not be influenced, or even be suspected of being influenced, by a consciousness of weakness on the sea.” Nations are like dogs in this, that the weaker must needs put his tail between his legs and sneak away when trouble brews. But, if any one doubts that nations are bullies, let him consider the names that are given to ships in Europe. With the _New York_ afloat, the American patriot was so far assured that his country would not be bullied, and so we should have peace. [Illustration: The _Columbia_ on her Government Speed Trial. _From a photograph by Rau._] The swifter cruisers like the twenty-two-knot _Columbia_ and the twenty-three-knot _Minneapolis_, and the little cruisers and gunboats for shoal water, followed the _New York_. In the meantime we were at work on battle-ships, beginning with the _Maine_ and ending with the _Iowa_, the _Indiana_, the new _Kearsarge_, and the _Illinois_. The English author of “Ironclads in Action” compares the _Iowa_ with the British _Majestic_. It is a most instructive comparison--the most instructive pages, for an American reader, in the whole of this valuable work are those devoted to this comparison. For, although the _Majestic_ is set down with a tonnage of 15,000 and the _Iowa_ with but 11,500, the Yankee ship throws at a broadside 4,532 pounds of metal (in guns above a twenty-pounder) to the other’s 4,000; she has an armor belt of fourteen inches to the other’s nine; the armor “upon the heavy gun positions” is “15-inch in the _Iowa_” to “14-inch in the _Majestic_”; and she could keep the sea five weeks to the Britisher’s four. On the other hand, the _Majestic_ has more freeboard, and could fight in a rougher sea, and she has the hull beneath her quick-firing guns protected in better fashion. But when it is all summed up, it is conceded by this English writer that the _Iowa_ is at least a good match for the bigger _Majestic_.