at inevitable.
"Give me plenty of iron in the men, and I don't mind so much about iron in
the ships," was a pithy saying of the American Admiral Farragut. There was
iron enough in the Austrian sailors, Tegethoff and Petz, to outweigh all
the iron in the guns and armour of the Italian admirals, Persano and
Albini, and the "iron in the men" gave victory to the fleet that on paper
was doomed to destruction.

At the present time, when in our morning papers and in the monthly reviews
we find such frequent comparisons between the fleets of the Powers,
comparisons almost invariably based only on questions of ships, armour,
guns, and horse-power, and leaving the all-important human factor out of
account, it will be interesting to compare the relative strength--on
paper--of the Austrian and Italian fleets in 1866, before telling the story
of Lissa.

Austria had only seven ironclads. All were of the earlier type of
armour-clad ships, modelled on the lines of the old steam frigates, built
of wood, and plated with thin armour. The two largest--ships of 5000 tons
and 800 horse-power--mounted a battery of eighteen 48-pounder smooth bores.
They had not a single rifled gun in their weak broadsides. These were the
"Ferdinand Max" and the "Hapsburg." The "Kaiser Max," the "Prinz Eugen,"
and "Don Juan de Austria" were smaller ships of 3500 tons and 650
horse-power, but they had a slightly better armament, sixteen smooth-bore
muzzle-loading 48-pounders, and fourteen rifled guns, light breech-loading
24-pounders. The "Salamander" and the "Drache" were ships of 3000 tons and
500 horse-power. They mounted sixteen rifled 24-pounders and ten
smooth-bore 48-pounders. These five smaller ironclads were the only ships
under the Austrian flag at all up to date. There were an old wooden screw
line-of-battle ship and four wooden frigates, but these had neither rifled
guns nor armour, and the naval critics of the day would doubtless refuse to
take them into account. Then there were some wooden unarmoured gunboats and
dispatch vessels.

Now turning to the Italian Navy List, we find that these six ironclads, two
of them without a single rifled gun, would have to face no less than twelve
armoured ships, every one of them carrying rifled guns. One of them was a
thoroughly up-to-date vessel, just commissioned from Armstrong's yard at
Elswick, the armoured turret-ram "Affondatore" (i.e. "The Sinker"). A
correspondent of "The Times" saw her when she put int