The Cincinnati Daily Star

A USELESS EXPENDITURE.

In many respects the large sums of money expended in keeping up the show or pretense of a naval establishment in this country is getting to be considered a useless squandering of the national resources.

The large appropriations for the army budget have some color of necessity. As long as the bad Indians last we must have paid soldiers to kill them and be killed by them, and this costs money. But for the continuance of a basswood or prunella naval establishment at an annual expense of fourteen or fifteen million dollars, there is no satisfactory excuse. The country has nothing of any corresponding value to show for the vast expenditures of the past eighteen years. A large number of unseaworthy vessels, a few semi-seaworthy vessels, three or four vessels that would rank as second-class in the British Navy, forty-six retired Rear Admirals, drawing $4,500 each per annum for doing nothing; about a dozen Rear Admirals who still keep up a professional pretense of doing something; a long list of Captains, Commodores, Commanders, Lieutenants, &c., &c., clear down to the powder-monkeys, who are the least obnoxious because the least expensive in the list—these "cankers of a calm world and a long peace" are all that Uncle Sam has to show at home or abroad for his money.

The appropriation bill for the next fiscal year sums up $7,834,957 for the pay of the officers and men of the navy and the marine corps, about three-quarters of a million of which is required to support the latter corps, which consists of less than one thousand five hundred men. It takes $675,760 to pay the retired list, which list is very much augmented by retiring able-bodied officers in order to make room for the promotion of others. The whole naval force, which costs the country about $8,000,000 per annum to support, consists of less than nine thousand men, exclusive of the officers, to whose support about three-fourths of the above sum goes. No wonder that the fashionable society of Washington is largely indebted to our naval heroes for its tone and brilliancy.