On Monday night a naval discussion, previously ventilated in the
Press, was transferred to the House of Commons. It concerned the stability of the 'Inflexible,' and Fillips like her,—i.e., ships with a plated " citadel " and unarmoured ends,—a stability which is disputed in case the artillery of the enemy should knock holes in the unarmoured ends and send the water through them. Mr. E. J. Reed, M.P. for Pembroke, formerly Constructor of the Navy, contends that if this happened, the vessel would almost certainly capsize, the armoured citadel not being itself steady enough to stand the capsizing power which would be exerted by the water rushing through the unarmoured ends. The Admiralty and the Government, on the other hand, and Mr. Barnaby on behalf of the Naval Construction Department, maintain that even under the circumstances supposed, the citadel of the Inflexible' would maintain its stability. Mr. Reed, however, asserts that the advisers of the Admiralty have never really met his case, but have merely declared that if the unarmoured ends of the ship were completely shot away or non-existent, the citadel would still be quite safe and uncapsizable. This, says Mr. Reed, might be true, and, nevertheless, if the unarmoured ends were not shot away, but were simply so perforated by artillery shots as to let the water rush through, the strain on the stability of the citadel would be far greater than it could bear. The controversy is evidently one which the First Lord has not quite mastered, and as the confidence of the public in the Navy depend* greatly on the conclusion of it, Mr. Reed's suggestion to refer the matter to an adequate scientific jury, whose judgment Parliament could both trust and weigh, seems a thoroughly reasonable one. If the public could not exactly follow the argument, they would at least form a pretty shrewd notion of the relative capacity of the arguers.
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