MODERN NAVAL DEVELOPMENTS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1832, 17 April 1907, Page 15

MODERN NAVAL DEVELOPMENTS

WHEAT EUROPEAN CIVILISATION OVTES TO GERMANY.

Writing in “Harper’s Magazine” on “The U.S. Navy Fifty Years Ago,’* Captain A. T. Mahan, Avho is acknowledged as the world’s greatest authority on the power of navies in national development, has some pregnant' sentences on present and coming changes in the Avorld’s commercial and territorial relations, and the ine\ r itabl© struggle for naval supremacy. The last sentence of the extract herewith is worthy- of special reflection. “Between the day of my entrance into the service, fifty years ago, and the present,” says Captain Mahan, “noAvhere is change more notable than in the national attitude towards, the Navy and the comprehension of its office. Then the Navy AVas accepted Avithout much question as part of the necessary lumber Avhich every adequately organised maritime State carried -.along, Avith the rest of a national establishment. Of Avhat use it was, or might be, few cared much to inquire. There Avas not sufficient interest even to dispute the necessity of its existence; although, it; is true, as late as 1875 an old-time Jeffersonian Democrat repeated to me Avith conviction the master’s dictum, that the Navy Avas a useless appendage—a statement Avhich the work of the War of Secession, as well on the Confederate as on the Union side, might seem to have refuted sufficiently and with abundant illustration. To such doubters before the war there Avas always ready the routine reply that a navy protected commerce; and American shipping, then the second in the world, literally whitened every »sea Avith its snowy cotton sails. In my first long voyage, in 1859, from Philadelphia to Brazil, it Avas no rare occurrence to be becalmed in the doldrums in company with two or three of these beautiful semi-clipper vessels, their low black hulls contrasting vividly Avith the tall pyramids of dazzling canvas which rose above them; a distinctive mark at that time of American shipping. They needed no protection then; and none foresaw that within a decade, by the operation oif a few small steam cruisers, they would be swept from the seas, never to return. Everything was taken for granted, and not the least that war was a barbarism of the past. From 1815 to 1850, the lifetime of a generation, international peace had prevailed substantially unbroken, despite numerous revolutionary movements internal to the States concerned; and it had been lightly assumed that these conditions Avould thenceforth continue, crowned as they had been by the sacrament of Peace, when the nations for the first tame gathered under a common roof the fruits of their several industries in the World’s Exposition of 1851. The shadows of disunion Were indeed gathering over our own land,, but for. the most of us they carried with, them no fear of Avar. The political condition and balance of the world now is very different from that of the period of which I hare been writing. Of this universal change and displacement, the most significant factor—at least in our Western civilisation-—has been the establishment of the German Empire,. with its. ensuing commercial, maritime, and naval development. ’To it certainly we owe the military impulse which has been transmitted everywhere to the forces of sea and land —an impulse for Avhich, in my judgment, too great gratitude cannot be felt. It has braced and organised Western civilisation for an ordeal as yet’ dimly perceived.”