distinguished gallantry. The gunboats would give them separate commands and a chance to exhibit individual merit. But the influential class, who looked upon the navy as an institution designed to afford aristocratic and profitable employment to the younger sons of prominent Government supporters, were of a different opinion.

For the genuine admirers of England it was sufficient, because an insular and manufacturing nation, with great colonial establishments, placed her principal dependence for offensive and defensive war on a navy, that we, a continental and agricultural power, with vast territory and without any colonial establishments, should do precisely the same. And next, we had a section of country specially commercial and maritime in its pursuits. Its navigators were anxious to penetrate every ocean in the eager pursuit of wealth. To protect them efficiently and securely in every sea would require a great navy. Consequently the interests of twelve or thirteen of the partners of a national and industrial brotherhood should be made to give way to those of four or five partners. England rendered all other interests subservient to commerce; why should not we? Why should not ninety-five husbandmen, in addition to paying to five merchants a higher scale of profits than they ever received on their own industry, also agree to pay taxes or duties forever, to insure the ventures of the latter against all losses from enemies? Could any English theory of political economy be wrong in itself, or not applicable to all countries and under all circumstances?

We are met on every page of a class of histories with the declaration that, if instead of arresting the growth of the navy and recommending gunboats and other defensive preparations, President Jefferson had carried out the building of the vessels authorized during Mr. Adams's Administration, and made a proportional increase, we should not, when the war with England in 1812 finally came, have been subject to invasion wherever a British army chose to disembark; in a word, that we should have been able to confine the contest principally to the ocean, and wage it there successfully. Even Mr. Cooper talks a little in. this vein in his Naval History.

England had in 1803, says a very accurate British writer, "no less than five hundred ships of war." She was steadily

1 Lockhart, in Life of Napoleon.

and even rapidly increasing this force. In 1805 she annihilated all European naval opposition at Trafalgar. The combined fleets of Christendom thenceforth were not a match for hers.

1

When President Adams's "quasi-war" with France closed, we had, including all descriptions and grades, thirty-four public vessels. On Jefferson's accession, some of the lighter and less valuable ones were sold, but Mr. Cooper concedes that "perhaps four-fifths" of the real strength of the navy "was preserved." The ships retained were fourteen in number, consisting of three of forty-four guns, four of thirty-eight, one of thirty-six, one of thirty-two, four of twenty-eight, and one of twelve. Mr. Jefferson found materials partly collected for half a dozen first-class vessels, authorized to be constructed during our maritime war with France. To subserve a special purpose, he recommended four small vessels in 1803, and they were completed, carrying in all thirty-five guns.

Let us suppose that the materials left by Mr. Adams had been promptly used, and that the Government had gone on devoting every farthing which was paid on the national debt, and which could have been safely raised by internal taxes, to building, fitting out, supporting and disciplining a navy, down to the year 1812-and all this in the bare anticipation of a war which might never take place. What then would have been our naval force compared with that of England? Our increase would not in the meantime have actually kept pace with her increase! Mr. Cooper states that in 1812 England had a thousand and sixty ships of war, and that between seven and eight hundred of them (probably as large a proportion of the whole number as in 1801) were efficient cruising vessels. The increase of the British navy, then, during nine years, had been upwards of five hundred vessels of war. We have been threatened with maritime wars-wars with the same power-since that of 1812. We never, it will probably be conceded, have shown any cowardly reluctance for the contest. Yet with a population more than five times doubled-with available wealth ten times doubled-we have not at this day (1857) an approach to the number of public ships which England added to her navy

Notwithstanding the outcry raised about reducing the navy, but one frigate was sold -the Washington; a ship, Mr. Cooper says, not built for or fit to be retained in the public service.

within those nine years! And be it remembered, we have not at this day a stronger navy, in proportion to our national population and wealth, than we had at the close of Jefferson's Administration. If his non-preparation was a curse, the curse follows and rests on us still.

Our population during that Administration did not exceed about one-fifth that of Great Britain. She was by far the richest nation, in money, on the globe. We had, probably, as little of the pecuniary "sinew of war" as any other nation of equal numbers.

How utterly absurd, then, is it to say that it was the duty of our Government, instead of going on paying our debts and leaving our people to grow in numbers and wealth, to suffer our debt to increase beyond the power of subsequent extinction, and additionally cripple the nation with taxes, in the attempt to build up a maritime strength capable of coping with that of Great Britain!

Our little navy, it is true, accomplished all but miracles in the second war with England. It covered itself and our national name with glory. But its weakness was one of its principal protections. England could not afford to send her vast armadas to chase our single frigates, darting like osprays over the ocean. Could we have sent out such fleets as France and Spain sent to Aboukir and Trafalgar, battles like those of Aboukir and Trafalgar would again have been fought; and whatever we may claim for ourselves on equal terms, we should not have had one against ten, not one against twenty ships, guns or men, to oppose hers. And in what condition would we have been, yet a comparatively moneyless and agricultural people, strained up to the last effort with compound interest accumulating on former national debts, and not enough current revenue to support our navy, to say nothing of other expenses-in what condition would we have been to lose a naval action or two like that of Trafalgar? Yet if we had won a Trafalgar one day, the next we should have had to fight it over again, and against overwhelming odds, with the mistress of the seas.

It was to be expected that a political opposition would prate, and it afforded excellent occasion for "Buncombe" speakers in Congress to talk of what we should have accomplished had we devoted ourselves thus "energetically" to the erection of a navy during Mr. Jefferson's Administration; and we see not why, by

the same reasoning, General Washington's and a considerable. share of Mr. Adams's should not also be included. But, it is very hard to credit that any well-informed and reflecting American, could ever, in the hottest frenzy of political excitement, have persuaded himself for a moment that this course would have been for the true interest of his country.

We built no great navy. We bore the brunt of subsequent war as best we might. We suffered calamities, and what some esteemed disgraces. Nearly all the European kingdoms, including those which have ground their own people into the dust for ages to prepare them to defend themselves against other nations, have been invaded, and their capitals have been in possession of an enemy within the present century. We, a comparative handful of population scattered over a surface equalling half Europe, suffered the same "disgrace."

But after attaching all possible importance to the real and the imaginary inflictions of the war of 1812, does any intelligent person doubt that we are stronger to-day by the mere force of increased growth, than we should have been had we steadily pursued the policy of preparing for war, and especially the policy of preparing to cope with England on the seas? Preparation for war requires expenditure, and renders all the capital it absorbs unproductive for other objects. To the extent of that absorption, means of development and improvement are sacrificed. These effects extend even to populational increase. Where means to open the road, bridge the river, and repel the savage are wanting, population does not spread so rapidly over territorial surfaces. Where governmental exactions fall heavily and chillingly on industry, early marriage and rapid and healthy increase are materially checked, even though actual physical want is not produced. Population only springs lush and vigorous to the maximum of increase where plenty, and free and smiling plenty, abounds.

We are now proportionably as unarmed on sea and land as in 1804. "Jefferson's peace policy" as it was contemptuously styled by that party who remained intellectually and politically European colonists-Jefferson's policy of GROWING instead of ARMING-prevailed until it became thoroughly incorporated into and the very corner-stone of our national policy. It may be properly called the American system. And what has been the

result? We will not ask the fields of Mexico to answer.

We

will not ask the colonized and blossoming wilderness-the farm-homes within the shadows of the Rocky Mountains-our banner floating on the shores of the Pacific-to make answer. But we will ask any occasional representative and remnant of the old European colonial party, if there is at this day a power on earth that has spent centuries in arming, that we either fear, or that could be induced, on any slight occasion, to provoke a war with the United States?

We resume our historic narrative. The gunboat bill passed Congress in the session of 1804-5. A stringent law was enacted for the apprehension by civil process (supported if necessary by military force) of violators of our neutrality, on board foreign armed vessels. If resistance took place and death ensued, it was made punishable as felonious homicide. The President was authorized to permit or interdict the entrance of foreign vessels into our waters, to prohibit supplies to them, and to remove them by force if necessary. Stringent enactments were made, at the President's suggestion, to prevent armed American merchant ships from forcing a contraband trade, as they were officially charged with doing, in the West Indies. A new territorial act was passed for Orleans, conforming its government generally to that of Mississippi, and preparing for its admission as a State when it should contain sixty thousand free inhabitants. Louisiana was erected into a territorial government of the second class. Michigan was detached from Indiana and also erected into a territorial government of the second class.

The President's correspondence, during the session, embraced few topics of present interest. In quoting some of his former remarks about the degradation of morals among mechanical operatives, we stated that he lived to retract those opinions. A letter to Mr. Lithson, January 4th, 1805, contains that retraction in the most ample terms.'

1 We will make room for the directly pertinent part of this letter, and the reader will doubtless keep in mind that it was not written during an election contest, but after its author had received the last offce he would accept from the hands of his countrymen. "Your letter of December 4th [he wrote Mr. Lithson] has been duly received. Mr. Duane informed me that he meant to publish a new edition of the notes on Virginia, and I bad in contemplation some particular alterations which would require little time to make. My occupations by no means permit me at this time to revise the text, and make those changes in it which I should now do. I should in that case certainly qualify several expressions in the nineteenth chapter, which have been construed differently from what they were intended. I had under my eye, when writing, the manufacturers of the great cities in the old countries, at the time present, with whom the want of food and clothing