of a great shop in London who is known as the
Universal Provider. If a general conflagration of war should break out
in the world, Yarrow would be known as one of the Universal Warriors,
for it would practically be a battle between Yarrow, Armstrong, Krupp,
and a few other firms. This is what makes interesting the dinginess of
the cantonment on the Isle of Dogs.

The great Yarrow forte is to build speedy steamers of a tonnage of not
more than 240 tons. This practically includes only yachts, launches,
tugs, torpedo boat destroyers, torpedo boats, and of late
shallow-draught gunboats for service on the Nile, Congo, and Niger. Some
of the gunboats that shelled the dervishes from the banks of the Nile
below Khartoum were built by Yarrow. Yarrow is always in action
somewhere. Even if the firm's boats do not appear in every coming sea
combat, the ideas of the firm will, for many nations, notably France and
Germany, have bought specimens of the best models of Yarrow construction
in order to reduplicate and reduplicate them in their own yards.

When the great fever to possess torpedo boats came upon the Powers of
Europe, England was at first left far in the rear. Either Germany or
France to-day has in her fleet more torpedo boats than has England. The
British tar is a hard man to oust out of a habit. He had a habit of
thinking that his battleships and cruisers were the final thing in naval
construction. He scoffed at the advent of the torpedo boat. He did not
scoff intelligently but because, mainly, he hated to be forced to change
his ways.

You will usually find an Englishman balking and kicking at innovation up
to the last moment. It takes him some years to get an idea into his
head, and when finally it is inserted, he not only respects it, he
reveres it. The Londoners have a fire brigade which would interest the
ghost of a Babylonian, as an example of how much the method of
extinguishing fires could degenerate in two thousand years, and in 1897,
when a terrible fire devastated a part of the city, some voices were
raised challenging the efficiency of the fire brigade. But that part of
the London County Council which corresponds to fire commissioners in
United States laid their hands upon their hearts and solemnly assured
the public that they had investigated the matter, and had found the
London fire brigade to be as good as any in the world. There were some
isolated cases of dissent, but the great English public as a whole