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Show O'Neil Against Torpedo Boat. Admiral O'Neil, chief of the bureau of ordnance, has a low opinion of torpedoes, tor-pedoes, torpedo boats, and torpedo boat destroyers. The utility of submarine sub-marine torpedoe boats, over which the French are making such a to-do, has not been proved to the satisfaction ot the admiral. He thinks that torpedoes torpe-does and torpedo boats may prove useful as scarecrows scare-crows for a time, but he cannot se that they have any other value. The alarm which was created in some quarters by the news that some torpedo boats had accompanied Admiral Cervera's squadron squad-ron has not been forgotten yet There were many who saw in them dangerous danger-ous enemies of the American warships. Perhaps they might have been of some service to the enemy had they been better handled than they were, but the fate they met with was an ignominious ignomini-ous one. Admiral O'Neil may be pardoned par-doned for his preference of battleships and armored cruisers to torpedo boats when one remembers how a wooden vessel like the Gloucester made mincemeat mince-meat of the torpedo boats she encountered encoun-tered at Santiago. On the other hand, It may be said with some degree of truth that there has not been yet a really fair test of the merits of these boats. |