modern unwieldy masses of iron, which have had, so far, a most disastrous history. The former might, so to speak, act while the latter was making up her mind. Even a Nelson might hesitate to risk a vessel representing six or seven hundred thousand pounds of the nation’s money, in anything short of an assured success. We have, however, yet to learn the full value and power of our ironclad fleet. Of its cost there is not a doubt. Some time ago our leading newspaper estimated the expense of construction and maintenance of our existing ironclads at £18,000,000. Mr. Reed states that they have cost the country a million sterling per annum since the first organisation of the fleet. Warfare will soon become a luxury only for the richest nations, and, regarding it in this light, perhaps the very men who are racking their powers of invention to discover terrible engines of war are the greatest peacemakers, after all. They may succeed in making it an impossibility. “Hereafter, naval powers prepared with the necessary fleet will be able to transport the base of operations to any point on the enemy’s coast, turn the strongest positions, and baffle the best-arranged combinations. Thanks to steam, the sea has become a means of communication more certain and more simple than the land; and fleets will be able to act the part of movable bases of operations, rendering them very formidable to powers which, possessing coasts, will not have any navy sufficiently powerful to cause their being respected.”(9) So far as navy to navy is concerned, this is undoubtedly true; yet there is another side to the question. A fort is sometimes able to inflict far greater damage upon its naval assailants than the latter can inflict upon it. A single shot may send a ship to the bottom, whilst the fire from the ship during action is more or less inaccurate. At Sebastopol, a whole French fleet, firing at ranges of 1,600 to 1,800 yards, failed to make any great impression on a fort close to the water’s edge; while a wretched earthen battery, mounting only five guns, inflicted terrible losses and injury on four powerful English men-of-war, actually disabling two of them, without itself losing one man or having a gun dismounted; while, as has been often calculated, the cost of a single sloop of war with its equipment will construct a fine fort which will last almost for ever, while that of two or three line-of-battle ships would raise a considerable fortress. Whilst the monster ironclad with heavy guns would deal out death and destruction when surrounded by an enemy’s fleet of lighter iron vessels or wooden ones as strong as was the _Victory_, she would herself run great risk in approaching closely-fortified harbours and coasts, where a single shot from a gun heavy enough to pierce her armour might sink her. Her safety would consist in firing at long ranges and in steaming backwards and forwards.