Germany, in constructing her modern fleet, had to bear in mind that the waters round her coasts are rather shallow, but she has produced some splendid ships of great fighting power and high speed. She has some ships under construction more powerful than any at present in her navy, and one of these--the cruiser _Moltke_--is expected to be quite as good as anything England or America can show. So great has been the demand for _Dreadnoughts_, that at the beginning of this year, for Great Britain alone, there were built or building no fewer than twenty-two, and arrangements had been made for laying down five more; while for foreign powers there have been constructed, or were still in the builders’ hands, up to January last, the enormous total of sixty. The average cost of these vessels has not been much short of a couple of millions sterling, and some have cost fully £2,300,000. The _Dreadnought_ type has admittedly not reached its maximum development yet, and it may well be asked, where is it to stop? At present battleships of a somewhat smaller type are being advocated. What will be the type of the battleship of the future? Revolutionary as have been the developments in the nineteenth century, great as have been the changes in the last twenty-five years, marvellous as has been the adaptation of scientific discoveries and appliances to the means for conducting naval warfare, it would be an idle boast for anyone to say that he can see finality. The dream to render war impossible by the introduction of some dread weapon has been entertained by many inventors, but never a one of them has seen its fulfilment. When steam-driven armoured warships were proposed, there were not wanting those who declared that henceforth fleets of wooden walls were doomed, and that naval war would become an impossibility. Yet the wooden walls have passed away, the nations unanimously adopted the newer methods, and the contingency of naval war must ever be provided for. The heavily armoured iron ship, carrying few guns of enormous power, came; and when at last it was found that were the armour made much thicker the ship would sink under the weight of her own protection and armament, and that guns could be constructed to smash that armour, again the hope was entertained that the limit had been reached, that naval warfare had become an impossibility, and that the world’s highways on the vast and beautiful ocean should be devoted solely to the purposes of commerce and peace. But science had already come to the rescue and dispelled the illusion before it was half-formed. Steel, at first gradually and then wholly, took the place of iron in the building of ships, the production of guns, and the manufacture of projectiles. Steel itself has been improved since it was made possible by the Bessemer process, and Harveyised steel, Krupp steel, and steel toughened with nickel or chrome or tungsten, or by what is known as