THE RENEWED NAVY DEBATE.
R. OFILLDERS made the best, if he did not make the most, of the fine opportunity that offered itself to him on Thursday evening. Considering the unsparing way in which he was attacked in his absence, during his long illness, and the diligent ingenuity with which the accusations against his administration were kept alive while his assailants always avoided since his reappearance in Parliament any fair and complete debate of them, he had many reasons to be thankful to Mr. Ward Hunt for the abundant indiscretion of his speech in moving the Navy Estimates. But that great good-nature which would be a weakness in him, if it were not strangely combined with such a clear-headed and determined faculty of administration, enabled him to rebut every charge that had been made against his Ad 'ralty administration, without saying one wounding word concerning the minor officials of the former Tory Admiralty who had so persistently and bitterly urged them. He did not even say, what must surely have often been near the tip of his tongue, that Mr. Disraeli had shown his sense of the conduct of Mr. Corry's former staff by not inviting any one of them to return to that department. Well it is for England, that despite the peculiar acrimony which Admiralty administration seems to engender, the great mechanism which keeps our Navy, not merely the first in the world, but a match for all the others, goes always steadily on. Any other department would have broken utterly down, if it had been subjected to the mutinous spirit of leading officials, and the unscrupu- lous Parliamentary opposition with which the late First Lord and his predecessor have had to deal. There was no more pertinent passage in Mr. Samuda's excellent speech than that in which he referred to the accepted continuity of policy in the Indian and Foreign departments,- while at the Admiralty a Tory First Lord usually tries at once to make political capital at the expense of his predecessors.
When Mr. Ward Hunt was placed at the Admiralty, there was, it may be said, a general feeling in his favour. He had not done ill at the Treasury during his two-years' service in the last Tory Administration ; and although no one supposed that he could return there as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a Budget to defend against Mr. Gladstone, it was certainly not expected that on his first appearance as First Lord of the Admiralty he should find himself thrown over by Sir Stafford Northcote, in consequence of a "scare" calculated, if it had been well-founded, to seriously .affect the condition of our finances. Mr. Childers made it perfectly plain that even in regard to boilers, the First Lord had not mastered the mean- ing of the return he had laid before the House. At most, three or four vessels in the entire steam Navy could be said to be imperfectly fitted ; and there is an ample supply in stock to cover all possible casualties and emergencies.
But the question of questions, after all—and Mr. Childers stated it with due distinctness and answered it absolutely—is, What is the relative strength of the English Navy, as compared with the other navies of the world ? When a First Lord speaks of his charge as in part composed of "dummy ships," and as a "fleet upon paper," it is well to know whether this is all we can show for ten millions a year. The main statement of Mr. Childers's speech, uttered with very deliberate and em- phatic gravity, was that, (1) supposing England to be assailed by a combination of any three of the existing Naval Powers, she could at once maintain her control of the Channel, the Medi- terranean, the Chinese, and the Colonial waters ; (2), that within three months she should have chased the commerce of her enemies off every ocean ; (3), and that within a year, or at the outside fifteen months, no vessel-of-war could put out of a hostile port without the certainty of being met by superior force. And this statement was fully justified by his careful and exhaustive analysis of the various considerable navies of the world, especially those which have hitherto been the most serious rivals of England, the French and the American.
Great was the amazement of the House to hear the Secre- tary of the Admiralty immediately admit that Mr. Childers was perfectly right, that our Navy was certainly as strong as any two others, and would even be able to hold its own in a war with "many combined fleets." But a still more flagrant surprise was in store when the First Lord, at a later stage of the debate, . assured the House that it was not in reality his statement which • had alarmed the country, but the fact that Mr. Goschen had not • contradicted his assertion on the first night of the debate with sufficient emphasis. A more extraordinary plea was never put forward by a responsible Minister to cover his incapacity. Mr. Goschen's reply on Thursday night was certainly marked by no defect of indignation, and by no want of clear and definite -challenge as to statement. Now that it has failed of its pur- pose, we shall, we presume, be expected to regard the "scare" as only a joke. But the ponderous person at the head of the Admiralty had better learn, from what has happened this week and last, that even Mr. Disraeli and his large majority will little avail, if he pleases to amuse himself by producing panic in England. The result of the debate is so far damaging to the new Administration, and it is the first serious damage it has sustained. Mr. Childers's speech is a considerable public service, not merely for its masterly vindication of the Naval policy of the Gladstone Government, but for its accurate and • complete survey of our whole Naval position, and for the whole- some, not at all boastful, confidence which it breathes.
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