"

It has not, however, seemed that their revival is imperative. There is a community of interest on the part of owners, therefore they can delegate authority to leading bankers; and if the latter are enabled to shape the policy of the larger companies, a recurrence of "rate wars can be avoided. Such a course has been pursued in the East, as witness the entrance into the directories of the Baltimore and Ohio, Chesapeake and Ohio, and Norfolk and Western railways of representatives of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the extension of the Vanderbilt influence to other properties, and the dominance of leading bankers in various directions. A request from the latter will have more force than would the strongest pool in restraining the zeal of ambitious agents to overreach their rivals. Hence the problem of maintaining remunerative rates is in process of solution by means which no legislation would seem able to circumvent. Where consolidations are forbidden by law, leases of the property and the operation of the latter under separate names are usually possible; and as control of the company is the result aimed at, the manner of its accomplishment is not material.

THE SCIENCE OF WAR

IN

DEVELOPMENT OF THE NAVY

BY EDGAR S. MACLAY

N the course of the past century the United States built five distinct fleets of war-craft, each one being such a vast improvement over its predecessor as to cause a revolution in naval architecture in all maritime Powers. It is scarcely too much to say that American shipbuilders have forced the somewhat conservative and phlegmatic naval administrations in European countries to build and rebuild their war fleets five times in the nineteenth century. As old Captain Symonds of the Royal Navy expressed it in 1777, after his ship, the Cerberus, had narrowly escaped destruction from a torpedo discharged by a Yankee submarine boat, "the ingenuity of these people is singular in their secret modes of mischief." It certainly is true that every innovation and improvement devised by the Americans in naval warfare was at first ridiculed and stoutly resisted by our friends across the ocean, and every imaginable mishap was predicted for those rash Americans and their " bundles of pine boards with a gridiron flag floating over them."

It was our first group of war-ships in the present century-the Constitution, United States, President, Crescent, Constellation, Congress, and Chesapeake — that made the first startling revolution in naval warfare, namely, the concentration of the power of a ship-of-the-line in the space of a frigate. Down to that time the line-of-battle ship was the bulldog of the high seas. No craft of lower rating would have presumed for a moment to dispute the

right of way with her. By introducing a number of improvements, and increasing the length of their frigates only twelve feet, American shipwrights produced a class of war-ships" terrible nondescripts" the English then called them-which, though nominally and visibly much. smaller than the line-of-battle ship, were superior to those huge craft in sailing qualities, and equal to them, as the British repeatedly asserted, in their fighting capacity. Our English friends declared that these new frigates were "line-of-battle ships in disguise," and sent out from Cadiz some of the largest vessels that had been under Nelson's command at Trafalgar, disguised as frigates, to meet our Constitution.

The principal innovation in the frigates of the Constitution class was that of placing 24-pounders on the main deck, and 32- and even 42-pounders on the quarter-deck and forecastle, at a time when English experts declared that only 18- and 24-pounders should be carried. About a year before the War of 1812 broke out, Captain Carden of the new British frigate Macedonian-then considered the finest specimen of British naval architecture afloathappened to be in Lisbon, and dined with Captain Decatur aboard the United States, then at anchor in the Tagus. Carden particularly pointed out the inefficiency of the 24-pounders on the main deck of the United States, and said that they could not be handled with ease. and rapidity in battle, and that long 18-pounders would do as much execution, and were as heavy as experience had proved that a frigate ought to carry. 'Besides, Decatur," said Carden," though your ships may be good enough, and you are a clever set of fellows, what practice have you had in war? There's the rub." Singularly enough, these commanders, in the same ships, met in battle a year after this conversation, and the United States captured the Macedonian with almost as much ease and impunity as if the Englishman had been a sloop-of-war.