New Ulm Weekly Review

The Formidable, which has just been launched in France, and which is classed as the most powerful ship in the French navy, is a steel vessel of 11,441 tons, with an estimated horse power of 8,500 and a speed of fifteen knots. She draws twenty-five and three-quarters feet of water, and carries armor ranging in thickness from seventeen and three-quarters to twenty-one and one-half inches. Her armament consists of three seventy-five ton and twenty light guns. The only completed ship in the British navy which is her equal in size, power or armament is the Inflexible, which is of iron and which has not exhibited the speed which the Formidable is expected to attain. In view of the great attention which France has for some years paid to the work of constructing a powerful navy there is ground for the agitation now going on in England without taking into account the threatened war with Russia, for the improvement of the British navy. It is remarkable that the four most powerful ships in the world—although none of them has been subjected to the tests which the powerful British and French ships have, and two of them are not completed—belong to Italy, which is otherwise an inferior naval power. These four vessels are the Duilio, Dandolo, Italia and Lepanto. Each has four 100-ton guns. The two former are armored to the depth of twenty-two inches each; the two latter to that of thirty-six inches. The displacement of the Italia and Lepanto is 1,000 tons each, or from 2,000 or 2,500 tons more than the Formidable or Inflexible.