which the carriage was introduced into the service was of the most unsatisfactory kind. Colonel Moncrieff appears never to have been consulted as to the mode of the execution of his carriages; he was never informed of complaints made against them, or called upon to suggest remedies for them. Carriages have been introduced into many of our forts and called by Colonel Moncrieff's name, which were, in fact, not adopted at his suggestion, and contained a whole series of defects which he could have remedied. Yet, when the annual reports of trials came in, he was not informed of the failure of the carriages he had objected to. Again, it will be easily intelligible to any one, that in a case like that of Colonel Moncrieff's carriage, with the principle of which many of our readers are familiar, everything depends upon nice adjustment. Colonel Moncrieff's principle consists in utilising the recoil of the gun in such a way, that, after it has been fired, the gun is made to descend behind a parapet, so that the gunners are never exposed, as is the case with all embrasure or barbette batteries. Now it is obvious that the value of this principle depends entirely upon the accuracy with which the recoil is so arranged that the projectile shall leave the bore before the gun begins to recoil. If the gun begins to recoil too soon, the flight of the projectile is injuriously affected. Now we have the strongest reasons for believing – and our information is not derived from Colonel Moncrieff himself – that in those forts in which Colonel Moncrieff's system and his adjustment have been fully adopted, the results have been most satisfactory as to accuracy of firing as well as in other respects; but that in other forts, the adjustment has been so carelessly made, under direction other than that of Colonel Moncrieff, that the flight of the projectile becomes hopelessly uncertain. Yet the experiments at these latter forts are supposed to be experiments with Colonel Moncrieff's carriage, and are not known to the officers who conduct the annual practice to be other than Colonel Moncrieff's own; so that his invention is discredited in the minds of artillery officers, by results for which not he, but the Ordnance Department itself, is responsible.
Now, supposing that by any accident there had crept into a public department, in some of its lower grades, unscrupulous men, who wished for their own purposes to discredit a man in Colonel Moncrieff's position, is it not obvious what facilities would thus be placed within their reach? The reports "on Colonel Moncrieff's carriage" could be used as conclusive evidence against him, and in favour of trusting to the department itself. We do not say that anything of the kind has actually happened. We do say that the feeling prevalent everywhere about this department – prevalent among many artillery officers to whom we have spoken, as well as among the manufacturers and inventors who have come into personal relations with it – is that the system of obscurantism, which we have described, raises such a cloud of suspicion that nothing short of positive proof can dispel it. The officials in this, as in other matters, are not above suspicion, and above suspicion they ought to be.
So far we have, in regard to Colonel Moncrieff, referred to the treatment of the system he originally introduced as the Counterweight Carriage. But there is a long count against the Ord-
