Official Memorandum, giving particulars of the Navy Estimates, among members of the House of Commons just before last. mail left England, This is the first time such a document has been furnished, and it will be of great service, not only to naval critics in Parliament but to the public. It is in fact somewhat similar to the Reports which Directors of Joint Stock Companies issue before the annual meeting of shareholders, and is so much in accordance with the business instincts of the nation that it is somewhat surprising that this mode of explaining the expenditure and what is being done with it has not been adopted before. It is a long document, much longer and fuller in details than the statement which has hitherto been made annually by the First Lord, and of course contains much matter about which men with knowledge and men with hobbies will find a great deal to say. As we knew already there has been a reduction made in the estimates, the amount approaching £800,000, as compared with the figures of last year, the totals being £12,476,000 and £13,270,000 respectively. But the decrease in expenditure is stated to be accompanied by considerable increase in the effective strength of the navy. The personnel has been enlarged by some 1,000 officers and men, " whilst the number of ships ready for commission on the 1st April, 1888, will be much in excess of my similar provision for many years past." The liabilities for ships and engines building by contract are to be brought down to a very low figure, and on ships building in the Dockyards a similar reduction is to be made. We are to owe and to spend less and to have a larger and more efficient force. If this be accomplished the question will be asked, what were former Boards about, why did they not get for the nation's money, more shi and more men at a cheaper cost? We must wait for at least a year before we see whether the promises of the present Board have been fulfilled. Meanwhile, the exposures of the incompetency of spending departments of the Navy, and in the Report of the Committee on Naval Contracts, which also appears in the mail's papers, shew that large savings could be made by the application of ordinary business capacity.
The First Lord enters into an explanation of how the vote of £4,700,000 to be expended over five years, which was granted: in 1885 has been spent. 'A large part of this sum was to be for ships built in private yards, and the ideas having Hitle else to do hurried forward their work, and in consequence the amount for five years was spent in three. Torpedoes and other unforeseen items increase the expenditure. With allthis, andthe Special Vote, £31,000,000 been spent on the navy in the last two years. A good deal of this money has, as we shewed the other day, been squandered and much of it might have better spent, the First Lord admits, than it has been. But we are promised bet~ ter things in the future; and this is the condition in which Lord George Hamilton says we shall find the navy a twelvemonth hence There will be "an addition of twenty-five ships ready for commission. Ten of these will be armoured ships, including three of the Admiral class, together with the Warspite, the Hero, and the five belted ornisers built by contract. Two others will be protected ships, seven will be torpedo cruisers, and there are some smaller craft. The Renown and Sanspareil are to follow in the Autumn of 1888. Of new ships to be laid down in the year about to commence, the most remarkable are two protected cruis sers, to be built at Chatham, having a measured-mile speed of 20 knots an hour, or an "ocean speed" of 17 or 18 knots. These ships, it is stated, will faster than any ocean war cruisers that have yet been made, and beyond all doubt they will be of the highest possible value for the protection of our commerce. The new programme also includes three protected cruisers of very slightly less speed, and eight other vessels, making a total of thirteen. If all goes well, the addition to the Fleet in the two years ending at the close of March, 1888, will comprise forty-eight vessels, of which thirteen will be arnmourclads. "The First. Lord justly observes that if this addition is "abnormally great," it is none the less true that the Fleet previous to this increase was abnormally weak."
"The annual cost of keeping up the navy, allowances for what. shipowners call "depreciation," is stated by Lord George Hamilton at £1,805,000 which must or should be expended on new construction. This replacement has not always been made, and probably few ople know or supposed that such a large outlay was necessary, merely to keep one year's navy equal to that of the preceding year. It is an expenditure that should be closely watched, for nothing could be easier than for an unscrupulously economical Board to allow the ships in commission to fall into an unserviceable condition. For the first time in the history of the greatest naval power in the world a vote is to be taken for an Intelligence Department, which should have been established long ago. The Memorandum gives full peters: of naval ordnance, for which.a largely increased vote is asked, owing to the provision which has become necessary for quick firing guns, the amount for which was reduced in last yern's estimates. The sum asked for is £313,000, against £42,000 in 1886. Until 1880, the Memorandum says, " the muzzle-loaders of the British Navy were about equal in accuracy and penetration to breech-loading guns of foreign nations. Since then the development of slow-burning powder has necessitated the production of a breechloader different in shape from, and far superior in the high velocity it imparts. to the old breechloader. The only breechloaders in the British service, with the exception of a few 40 and 20-pounders, are of the most modern type; the great bulk of the breechloaders in foreign service are of the older type, and fairly comparable to the old muzzle-loader of similar calibre." This reads comfortably after all we have heard about our guns, but the Times reminds us that a few months since it was officially admitted that the only modern armour-piercing breech-loading. guns afloat were those of the Colossus, and those the captain of that vessel had been specially ordered not to fire. This reminder rather diminishes our satisfaction in the last sentence of the above extract; so, too, when we read about the superior fleet which we shall have next year, it is somewhat awkward to learn from' an authority like Mr. Pearce, M.P. that we have not a single be ship of war that can cross the Atlantic at full speed. He cannot recall a single British armour-clad_ that could reach New York at all under her own steam-power; and this in the days when the Etruria runs across at an average speed of 19.4 knots all the way. It is rather curious that the same nwnber of the Times which contains the letter of Mr. Pearce in which we find this has a brief account of a lecture by a British naval captain, before the Royal United Service Tustitution, in which he strongly advocates making our men-of-war mastless, He would wurig and unmast, except the lower masts, on which he would carry but only fighting turrets.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.