any more than the sickle can keep pace with the McCormick reaper, or the slow coach with the railway-car or the telegraph.  Mail-clad steamers, impervious to shells and red-hot balls, and almost, if not quite, invulnerable by solid shot and balls from rifled cannon at the distance of a hundred yards, have been launched upon the deep, and already form an important part of the navies of France and England.  They have been adopted by Russia, Austria, and Spain; and yet, although our country furnishes iron which has no superior,—­although it has taken the lead in the steamship, the telegraph, and the railway,—­although at this moment it requires the mail-clad steamer more than any other nation, to relieve its fortresses, to recover the cotton ports, and to defend its great cities from foreign aggression, not a single one has yet been launched, or even been authorized by Congress.  For years we have had no more efficient Secretary of the Navy, or more able and energetic chiefs of the bureaus, if we may judge from what has already been accomplished; but it depends on Congress to give the proper authority to construct a mail-clad navy, and to provide the necessary funds.

The importance of defensive armor has ever been felt.  The warriors of ancient times went to the field in coats-of-mail, and both Homer and Virgil dilate upon the exquisite carving of the shield.  The hauberk and corselet were used by the Crusaders, and the chain-armor of Milan was nearly or quite impervious to the sword and spear.  Mexico and Peru were won in great part by coats-of-mail.  They were used until gunpowder changed the whole course of war,—­and the Chevalier Bayard, that knight “sans peur et sans reproche,” who had borne himself bravely and almost without a scar in a hundred battles, in his last Italian campaign, as he was borne from the field, after being struck down by a cannon-ball, mourned that the days of Chivalry were ended.  And Shakspeare tells us that this villanous saltpetre had prevented at least one sensitive gentleman from being a soldier.

Defensive armor is still used by tribes who are destitute of powder; and Barth and Barkie, in their African expeditions, found Moorish horsemen pressing down from the North into the interior of the Soudan, arrayed in coats-of-mail of the same description with that which figured in the Crusades.

In the naval contests of the last century armed ships were inferior in size to those of modern times, and their tough oak sides were not easily pierced by the six- and nine-pound balls then in general use, and twelve-pounders were considered of unusual dimension.  During the war between France and America, a merchantman, armed with nine-pounders, actually beat off a sloop-of-war and several Spanish privateers; but now frigates, and even sloops-of-war, are armed with Dahlgren guns of eight- to eleven-inch bore, which throw balls of sixty to one hundred pounds,—­also with superior rifled cannon.  Whitworth and Armstrong guns are in use that throw shot or shell distances of three to five miles, which “the wooden walls” of neither England nor America are able to resist.