The modern battleship is a vastly more complex structure, and represents more complex ideas and combinations than did Ericsson’s “Monitor.”  It contains a battery of guns of the heaviest type known to naval ordnance.  At present such guns are usually of 12-inch bore and throw a shell of about 800 pounds weight, with an initial velocity of nearly 3,000 feet per second.  Then there is a supporting battery of guns, 6, 7, or 8 inches in diameter of bore, and finally a secondary battery of smaller quick-firing guns, throwing shells of from 1 pound to 20 or 30 pounds weight, and added to these there may be a torpedo outfit as well.  The exigencies of fighting ships at sea and in all weathers seems to have pronounced against the monitor type with its low freeboard as unsuitable for use on the open sea, while the enormous advances in modern guns and armor have made a totally different problem of the distribution of means offensive and defensive.  Again, the monitor type was never intended for long cruising, or indeed for other service than the defence of coasts and harbors.  The policy of building a vessel thus adapted only to an inner line of defence, and not adapted to an outer line of defence and offence as well, has been further called in question, and the judgment of the present day has decided against such policy.  It is true that in the so-called “new navy,” begun in 1883, one monitor, the “Monterey,” has been built, while four others of older type have been somewhat modernized, and there are three monitors building at the present time.  It may be doubted, however, if they will be followed by others, at least so long as the conditions of naval warfare and the spirit of public policy remain as they now are.

The monitor type was a perfect solution of the problem of its day, and nobly it answered the calls made on it.  The problem has now changed, the conditions affecting its solution have also changed, and it is no discredit to the original type that it now seems to have had its day, and that it must give way to other forms more perfectly expressing the spirit of the present age, and the means available for the solution of present-day problems in the art of naval war.

In many ways, however, the influence of Ericsson’s work still lives in the modern battleship, and while in our modern designs we have gotten far away from the essential features of the monitor type, yet it is not too much to say that the germ of the modern battleship is in many ways found in the “Monitor,” especially as expressed in terms of concentration of heavy gun-fire and localized protection of gun positions; and in more ways than may be suspected, the influence of Ericsson and of his work had its part in the developments which have led to the splendid designs of the present day.