ground; but such actual service tests as the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Fort Fisher, and the forts at Alexandria contradict this entirely, and indicate that, except for the moral effect, our old forts, with modern guns in them and some additional strengthening at their weaker points, would answer all purposes so far as bombardment from fleets is concerned.  This is not saying that the forts are good enough in their present condition, but simply that they can readily be made far superior in strength, both offensive and defensive, to any fleet that could possibly be provided at anything like the same expense, or in fact at any expense that would be justified by the condition of our treasury, either past, present, or probable future.  It might be added that a still more serious difficulty in the way of the military engineer, so far as practice and its consequent experiences are concerned, is that for many years past, until quite recently, there have been no funds either for experiments or actual work on fortifications, so that very little has been done on them during the last twenty years.

Without going into the question of the necessity for sea coast defenses, we may assume that an enemy is likely to come into one of our harbors and that it is desirable to keep him out.  What provisions must be made to accomplish this, i.e., to secure the safety of the harbors and the millions of dollars’ worth of destructible property concentrated at the great trade centers that are usually located upon those harbors?  We must first take a look at the enemy and see what he is like before we can decide what will be needed to repel his attack.  For this purpose we need not draw on the imagination, but we may simply examine some of the more recent armadas sent to bombard seaports.  For example, the fleet sent by Great Britain to bombard the Egyptian city of Alexandria, in 1882.  This fleet consisted of eight heavy ironclad ships of from 5,000 to 11,000 tons displacement and five or six smaller vessels; and the armament of this squadron numbered more than one hundred guns of all calibers, from the sixteen inch rifle down to the seven inch rifle, besides several smaller guns.  But this fleet represented only a small fraction of England’s naval power.  During some recent evolutions she turned out thirty-six heavy ironclads and forty smaller vessels and torpedo boats.  The crews of these vessels numbered nearly 19,000 officers and men, or about three times the entire number in our navy.  Such a fleet, or, more likely, a much larger one, might appear at the entrance say of New York harbor within ten days after a declaration of war, and demand whatever the nation to which it belonged might choose, with the alternative of bombardment.

The problem of protecting our people and property from such attacks is not a new one, and, in fact, most of the conditions of this problem remain the same as they were fifty years ago, the differences being in degree rather than in kind.  The most natural thought would be to meet such a fleet by another fleet, but the folly of such a course will become apparent from a moment’s consideration.  The difficulties would be: