I am satisfied that the ordinary explanation of that naval superiority which England has generally maintained over France is the true explanation.  Certainly never were there stouter ships than those which France sent forth to fight her battles at the Nile and Trafalgar.  Never braver men trod the deck than there laid down their lives rather than abase their country’s flag.  Yet they were beaten.  The very nation which, on land, fighting against banded Europe, kept the balance for more than a generation at equipoise, on the water was beaten by the ships of one little isle of the sea.  In the statement itself you have the explanation.  The ships were from an isle of the sea.  The men who manned them were born within sight of the ocean.  In their childhood they sported with its waves.  At twelve they were cabin-boys.  At twenty, thorough seamen.  Against the skill born of such an experience, of what avail was mere courage, however fiery?

A similar train of remarks may with truth be made about our Northern and Southern States.  No doubt, the Rebel Government may send to England and purchase swift steamers like the Alabama, and man them with the reckless outcasts of every nationality, and send them forth to prey like pirates upon defenceless commerce.  No doubt, in their hate, the Rebels may build sea-monsters like the Merrimack, or the Arkansas, or those cotton-mailed steamers at Galveston, and make all stand aghast at some temporary disaster.  These things are unpleasant, but they are unavoidable.  Desperation has its own peculiar resources.  But these things do not alter the law.  The North is thoroughly maritime, and in the end must possess a solid and permanent supremacy on the sea.  The men of Cape Cod, the fishermen of Cape Ann, and the hardy sailors who swarm from the hundred islands and bays of Maine, are not to be driven from their own element by the proud planters of the South.  Naval habits and naval strength go hand in hand.  And in estimating the resources of any power, the first question is, Has she sailors,—­not men of the land, but men of the sea?

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There is a second question, equally important.  What is a nation’s capacity for naval production?  What ship-yards has it?  What docks?  What machine-shops?  What stores of timber, iron, and hemp?  And what skilled workmen to make these resources available?  A nation is not strong simply because it has a hundred ships complete and armed floating on its waters.  “Iron and steel will bend and break,” runs the old nursery-tale.  And practice shows that iron and steel wrought into ships have no better fortune, and that the stoutest barks will strand and founder, or else decay, and, amid the sharp exigencies of war, with wonderful rapidity.  Not what a nation has, then, but how soon it can fill up these gaps of war, how great is its capacity to produce and reproduce, tells the story of its naval power.