Book excerpt: Excerpt from Your Navy as a Fighting Machine What is a capital ship It is a vague sort of term that is frequently employed; nor is much further information usually to be gleaned than that it's a battleship. If there be one thing more than another Of which the general public is supremely ignorant that thing is a battleship. They may know its guns, they may know its displacement, speed and various other de tails - the sort Of thing to be found in every explanatory footnote in the daily Press. But it is safe to wager that not one man in a million in all the British Empire knows exactly what a battleship is for. All have a vague idea, because it so chances that people think in Dreadnoughts and they all know that Dreadnoughts are somewhere in the top line of battleships. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.