Doubtless it will have been noticed by any person sufficiently interested in naval affairs to read the articles which appear from time to time in the daily and weekly press, and in the monthly and quarterly periodicals, that in them the basis of comparison is always the ship and the gun. Also, that mostly they treat by computation of the battleship alone the comparative strength of the nations.

It is not argued that we have done, or that we are ever likely to have done, with the gun as the primary armament of the warship, but that she is threatened gravely by this newer form of attack is a fact to which none who consider the matter can be blind. For all the large unities of the fleet today there is a danger which has come, and which has come to stay; and this danger is embodied in the words that stand at the head of this article: the menace of the torpedo.