“We witnessed the gloom which that event cast over high and honorable minds....  Never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American; and though we cannot say that Captain Dacres, under all circumstances, is punishable for this act, yet we do say there are commanders in the English navy who would a thousand times rather have gone down with their colors flying, than have set their fellow sailors so fatal an example.”

No country newspaper in America, railing at Hull’s cowardice and treachery, showed less knowledge or judgment than the London Times, which had written of nothing but war since its name had been known in England.  Any American could have assured the English press that British frigates before the Guerriere had struck to American; and even in England men had not forgotten the name of the British frigate Serapis, or that of the American captain Paul Jones.  Yet the Times’s ignorance was less unreasonable than its requirement that Dacres should have gone down with his ship,—­a cry of passion the more unjust to Dacres because he fought his ship as long as she could float.  Such sensitiveness seemed extravagant in a society which had been hardened by centuries of warfare; yet the Times reflected fairly the feelings of Englishmen.  George Canning, speaking in open Parliament not long afterward, said that the loss of the Guerriere and the Macedonian produced a sensation in the country scarcely to be equaled by the most violent convulsions of nature.  “Neither can I agree with those who complain of the shock of consternation throughout Great Britain as having been greater than the occasion required....  It cannot be too deeply felt that the sacred spell of the invincibility of the British navy was broken by those unfortunate captures.”

Of all spells that could be cast on a nation, that of believing itself invincible was perhaps the one most profitably broken; but the process of recovering its senses was agreeable to no nation, and to England, at that moment of distress, it was as painful as Canning described.  The matter was not mended by the Courier and Morning Post, who, taking their tone from the Admiralty, complained of the enormous superiority of the American frigates, and called them “line-of-battle ships in disguise.”  Certainly the American forty-four was a much heavier ship than the British thirty-eight, but the difference had been as well known in the British navy before these actions as it was afterward; and Captain Dacres himself, the Englishman who best knew the relative force of the ships, told his court of inquiry a different story:—­“I am so well aware that the success of my opponent was owing to fortune, that it is my earnest wish, and would be the happiest period of my life, to be once more opposed to the Constitution, with them [the old crew] under my command, in a frigate of similar force with the Guerriere.”  After all had been said, the unpleasant result remained that in future,