Dreadnought

a battleship added to the British navy in 1906. It is 490 feet long, 82 feet wide, and draws 31 feet of water. It displaces 17,900 tons of water. It carries ten guns that throw twelve-inch shells a distance of four miles, and sixteen four-inch guns. It is protected with armor plate eleven inches in thickness. Under full head of steam--23,000 horse-power--it makes twenty-one knots or over twenty-four miles an hour. At the time, it was the largest, the heaviest, the most nearly bulletproof and the swiftest battleship afloat. It cost no less than $9,000,000. It set the pace for a new type of naval construction. Other nations began to build large ships, and the United Kingdom felt obliged to build still larger--super-Dreadnoughts. In 1909 there were 6 ships of this type in the French navy; 10 in the German navy; 9 in the British navy; 6 in the American navy, etc. Nor was this all. Japan had 2 in the water and 6 under way. Germany had 11 in the shipyards. The United Kingdom and the United States are building more of them.

The significance of the Dreadnought is comparable to that of our own ironclad Monitor that rendered wooden navies useless. In the great naval review held in the Thames in 1909 the United Kingdom drew up 150 men-of-war in a double line for inspection. They cost the nation $300,000,000. Scarce any of them were a dozen years old. The most antiquated bark in the fleet carried a belt of armor 20 inches thick, and bore date of 1889. Yet, if taken out to sea and given a free fight, the Dreadnought and its consorts might have stood off the rest of the British fleet with ease. The 12-inch guns of a Dreadnought can put holes through anything else afloat before their opponents approach within a mile of what to them is target distance. The shells of nine-tenths of the ships in the British navy would have about as much effect on a ship of the Dreadnought type as dried peas would have on a barn. If the entire British fleet, the ships of the Dreadnought type excepted, were attacked by half a dozen of the new German ships, the only way to save a part of the fleet would be flight to all points of the compass; for, if the fleet were to keep together, the ships could be sent to the bottom, one by one, about as fast as the monster 12-inch Krupp guns could be brought to bear on them. The naval situation is one of consternation and has become one of stupendous financial magnitude.

The building of a modern battleship is so expensive as to threaten bankruptcy to a nation. It costs about as much to build, equip, and maintain one of these ships as it would to put up new buildings and maintain Harvard University.