Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Strange, in a letter to Tuesday's Times, expresses
his opinion that such an iron ship as the 'Van- guard' is the naval equivalent in force of a whole corps d'armere in the Army—i.e., of 30,000 men----and he very justly remarks that no commander would accept the responsibility of command- ing an army if he knew that a single accidental shot of the enemy's might annihilate a whole wing at a blow. The truth undoubtedly is, that our power of properly governing and ad- ministering the immensely costly and powerful naval weapons which we have invented, has fallen far behind our skill in constructing those weapons. We have made the sort of blunder which would be best illustrated by supposing the exist- ence of an organism as delicate as the human body, without the nervous system which governs, or as the philosophers say, "co-ordinates," its movements. Certainly there was no sort of " co-ordination " of the ironclad fleet in the fog on the 1st Sep- tember. And unless such a co-ordination in times of peril can be established, it would be better to subdivide our risk, and have a mosquito fleet of gunboats, in place of these naval embodiments of corps d'armie.
