TECHNICAL MATTERS 55

and so on. The firms were therefore obliged to act without any military knowledge and to rely on their own methods; one aimed at cheapness, and the other at speed, and so on. But every warship is a compromise of different desires which can never all be fulfilled at one and the same time within the limits of the finished article. A certain armament, fuel storage, accommodation, buoyancy, armour plating, speed, are all wanted with a given displacement; then there is a fight in the committees over a matter of 25 or 50 tons; and if one wanted to satisfy everybody, one would soon have a ioo,ooo-ton ship without having settled anything at all. Thus it is the strategic idea of the ship which must be firmly determined before anything else; in the nature of things, however, only the supreme naval command, and not the firm, can decide this.

The new boats proved to be either unsuitable or undeveloped; we were involved in some danger with them in a storm off Norway. Caprivi discovered a way out of the conflict between the Admiralty engineers and myself, on the subject of the type of torpedo boat, by instituting in 1886 a Torpedo Inspection Board, which he handed over to me, and which covered all branches of the torpedo section. We elaborated the sea-going boat armed with artillery. The fleet training, the dockyards, and the workshops were now controlled by one hand, which had its advantages at this stage.