Show THE COAST DEFENSE The paper which Lieutenant Eugene Griffin read before the Military Service the defenses Institute on Thursday last on fenses of our coasts is attracting a good deal of attention throughout the country The United States have more seacoast to defend than any other nation is only surpassed wealth by England and is surpassed bv all in the matter of defending defend-ing her coast line and with the coast line defenseless the interior of the country might be invaded An enemy would find a difficult task in penetrating far into the interior of our country but such things are not beyond a possibility In the war of 1812 the English took and burned Washington and such a thing might be done again As Lieutenant Griffinplainly showed the ports of Boston Portland New York Newport Philadelphia New Orleans Baltimore and San Francisco are comparatively without defense and the visible wealth of these cities would be a tempting prize for which a powerful enemy would be willing to take any risk and which could now be taken without very great risk Purely the protection of these places as well as tho whole country coun-try is worthy the attention of the Government Gov-ernment and if some of the many millions I mil-lions which Congress has voted away to railroad schemes an Other private undertakings un-dertakings as well as some of the millions which have gone into the pension swindle had been devoted to placing our seacoast defenses I in a proper condition the humiliating picture which was drawn at Governors Island last Thursday would not have been seen New York alone will require some seventeen and a half millions of dollars to put it in a proper state of defense de-fense and some other important cities near the same amount and if the money were even now at the command of those who are in charge of the forts it would take some years to do the work necessary to make them an effective defense There was one thing in particular of which Lieutenant Griffin made mention and upon which the whole country has been relying thinking it the ne plus ultra of defensive warfare namely the torpedo system This he says is not entirely adequate and this has long been known but never has public attention been called to it before by a competent compe-tent military engineer It has been demonstrated that a vessel can car ry such submarine defenses as will explode ex-plode a torpedo without doing any damage dam-age to the boat using them For a torpedo tor-pedo to be effective in its work of destruction destruc-tion it must come in immediate contact with the object which it is sought to destroy de-stroy and it was to prevent this immediate immedi-ate contact that submarine armor was invented in-vented There has been no regular system sys-tem arranged and so far the armor has merely been extended arms or chains anything to catch a torpedo and explode it before the bottom shall strike it If the new gelatine gun lately invented proves a success this will in great measure meas-ure solve the problem of our coast defenses de-fenses as these guns are of so destructive a character that such vessels as the English turret ship the U Inflexible with armor from sixteen to twenty four inches carrying four 80ton guns with a displacement 11800 tons or theta the-ta ships the Duilio and Dandolo both of which have twentytwo inches of armor at the water line and carry four 100ton guns each would be shattered and sunk by well directed a shot from a 6inch rifled gelatine gun At present most of the forts are armed with the Rodman smooth bore guns and what their worth would be against such ships as those above mentioned is not known but certainly it would not compare with the new guns in destructive power If Lieutenant Griffin is successful in arousing in Congress a sense of the total inadequacy of our coast defenses he will have rendered his country a signal service ser-vice Lieutenant Griffin graduated from West I Point in 1875 third of his class and is a soninlaw of MajorGeneral Hancock I |