Concerning the frigates and sloops of our predecessors, their place is now taken, and their duties will be done, by the classes of vessel known generically as cruisers, protected or unprotected. The protection, the defensive element of strength, has reference mainly to the engines, to the motive power. The battery, the offensive factor, tends upon the whole to revert more and more to the development of fire, to utilizing the length of the vessel by multiplying the number of guns and diminishing their individual size; and the tendency is increased by the fact that, as such ships are expected to fight only vessels of their own kind, their probable target is penetrable by light guns. Speed is the great element in the efficiency of cruisers, and whatever the speed in smooth water, a great advantage inures to larger ships in heavy winds and seas. As for “armored” cruisers, of which there are many, they belong rather to the class of battle-ships than of cruisers. Whatever the advantages of the particular ships, the name suggests a regrettable confusion of purpose, and, in practice, a still more regrettable departure from homogeneity. A. T. MAHAN. LITERATURE “Time and space,” a noble philosopher has observed, “are but hallucinations.” It may be so, and from the point of view of the metaphysician ours may have been merely a “so-called nineteenth century.” Certain it is that to judge literature in blocks of centuries is to make a convenient but illogical cross-division. The early, and perhaps the most important, literary influences of the century were in existence long before 1801. Thus, if we look at whatever is now called _fin de siècle_, at violent antagonism to tradition and convention, at discontent of every sort with everything—with rank, wealth, morality, law, marriage, the family—we find that this passion was as noisy and self-complacent a hundred years ago as it is to-day. The French Revolution was the lurid playground of “New Women,” full of what they supposed to be new ideas. The German drama of 1780–1800, now best remembered by the parody called “The Rovers,” in the _Anti-Jacobin_, was replete with the humorless paradoxes and strained situations of Ibsen. The shortest way to an understanding of the antiquity of our “new ideas” is, in fact, a study of the Poetry of the _Anti-Jacobin_.