Mr. Brassey, who, having just returned from a yachting tour
round the world, had seen at Aden the gunboats built by Sir William Armstrong for the Chinese Government, urges on our Admiralty, in a letter to Wednesday's Times, the great import- ance of depending more on the heavily-armed small gunboats, and leas on the monster ironclads on which we have of late spent so much. He points out that to keep these monsters safe from torpedo attacks, they ought to be surrounded by a flotilla of smaller yessels carrying heavy guns ; and he shows that if this be the case, it will be comparatively unimportant to arm the monster ironclads themselves with the enormous guns for which they are at present designed. If unattended by a number of gun- boats, the captain would hardly venture to fire one of his enor- mous guns, because tlie inioke it would cause, and which would
cloud the whole neighbourhood for some time, would furnish admirable cover for an attack by torpedo-boats ; while if attended by a crowd of such smaller boats, the advantage of one or two enormous guns would be of less consequence. Moreover, our smaller boats can go through the Suez Canal, and might have got into places like Cronatadt and St. Petersburg, inaccessible to our larger ships. Unquestionably if the largest and costliest ships are to be even more exposed to destruction than the minutest and cheapest, it would be better to multiply the latter rather than the former. The fewer eggs we have in each basket, and the more numerous the baskets, the fewer will be broken by sudden cata- strophes. For the rest, will not the dismay caused by the awful and unexpected annihilation of a gunboat be much like the dismay caused by the unexpected and awful annihilation of a ' Hercules' an ' Inflexible,' or a ' Devastation?'
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