NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE experts were right; seamanship has prevailed over numbers, and Japan has won her Trafalgar. Admiral Rozhdestvensky, aided by most elaborate and costly prepara- tions to secure supplies of coal at sea, safely shepherded his great but not homogeneous fleet across the Indian Ocean—a feat for which every Admiral in Europe gives him high credit—and waited weeks off Indo-China for his last rein- forcements; but the hour at last arrived when he must either abandon his voyage or force a passage through the narrow strait of Tsushima. He met the crisis bravely ; but Admiral Togo had watched all his movements, and at the right moment sprang. On Saturday, May 27th, all his battle- ships and armoured cruisers opened a fire described by an eyewitness as "superbly terrible," and by nightfall the Russian fleet, terribly battered, and with its best vessels sunk, was in hopeless confusion. Then, "like a cloud of locusts," says the same eyewitness, the destroyers and torpedo-boats were loosed by the Japanese Admiral, and by morning the great fleet on which St. Petersburg had fastened its hopes was "practically annihilated." Six battleships—we quote Togo's own report—out of eight, including the flagship ; five cruisers, two special service ships, three destroyers, and one coast-defence ship had been sunk; and two battleships, two coast-defence ships, and one de- stroyer were captured. The Russians lost in all twenty-two ships and seven thousand men, while the Japanese lost only some torpedo-boats, and gained more than all they have lost during the war. It will be found, we believe, as accounts come in, that the Russians saved nothing worth saving, the destruction exceeding that of the Spanish Armada.
