determined on which standards winged victory should rest.
It was in a great degree the same with the carronades, which helped Nelson in his most dashing exploits. The carronades were not by any means first-rate guns, but they were a little better for practical purposes than any the French had. After a few trials, both our men and the French came to know this well; and the fact needs to be taken into account, as one of the effective causes which sent our men into every action with the certainty of victory, and taught the French sailors to anticipate defeat.
Who, then, has the right to deprive the navy of England of any even trifling advantage with which the genius of our country can furnish it?
What servant of the Crown has the right to say that foreign Powers may keep secret what inventions and improvements they will, but that for English committees and English departments it is too much trouble to sift, by careful examination, the wheat from the chaff, to give to all comers a patient and courteous hearing, and to try what can be learnt from every one?
We confess it seems to us that there has gradually crept in here a disastrous misconception. We have run a principle, founded upon a speech of Lord Palmerston, possibly in the main sound, into all kinds of deductions that have no connection with it. Many years ego, Lord Palmerston, defending the principle of allowing our manufacturers to supply foreign Powers with military stores, cited, as an illustration of the advantages of the system, the time when the Israelites had to go down to the Philistines to sharpen every man "his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock," and asked whether the position of the Philistines was not at that time a satisfactory one, though they allowed their enemies to improve their weapons among them. Now, in so far as we ourselves retain the plant for making weapons for other nations, it is no doubt true that we probably gain more than we lose by developing our trade in warlike weapons at the cost of other countries; but we are utterly at a loss to see how the principle implied in Lord Palmerston's illustration affords a justification for our positively urging our own inventors to lay their plans before foreign Governments before we try them. Yet that is what, in case after case, we have done. Indeed Colonel Maitland's lecture consists throughout of a report of the mode in which we have, as he puts it, "coming last, taken the best" from each of the inventions adopted by foreign Powers. The Woolwich foreman, whose speech is reported in the discussion which followed Colonel Maitland's lecture, supplied a significant comment. He, wishing to the utmost to glorify his own department, showed conclusively how servilely Woolwich has followed the lead of foreign manufacturers; how absolutely all principle, and science, and exhaustive investigation have been neglected; how afraid Woolwich has been during all this time of any independent judgment or any examination of the real merits of a question; how all that we had to trust to has been a kind of workshop knowledge, and a feeble assumption that, if other Powers did not adopt a certain improvement, we need be in no hurry to do so. Never has Woolwich realised the truth that the real efficiency of the guns and other warlike instruments of other Powers will be
