hands which can find or make new ones.  But the steamer has inexorable limitations.  Break her machinery, and, if there be no friendly dock open to receive her, she is reduced at once to a sailing ship, and generally a poor one, too.  Nor need you suppose accidents to cause this loss of efficiency.  The mode of propulsion implies brevity of power.  The galley depended upon the stalwart arms of its crew, and they were as likely to be strong to-morrow as to-day, and next month as to-morrow.  The ship puts her trust in her white sails and in the free winds of heaven, which, however fickle they may be, never absolutely fail.  But the steamer must carry in her own hold that upon which she feeds.  You can reckon in weeks, yes, in days, the time when, unless her stock be renewed, her peculiar power will be lost.

What a tremendous limitation this is!  A passenger-boat, whose engines move with the utmost possible economy, having no cargo but the food of her inmates, will carry only coal enough for thirty-three or -four days’ consumption.  This is the maximum.  The majority cannot carry twenty-five days’ supply.  And when we add the armament and ammunition, and all that goes to make up a well-furnished ship, you cannot depend upon carrying twenty days’ supply.  Put now, in time of war with a great maritime power, your ship where she would be most wanted, in the East Indies, and close against her the ports of the civilized world, and the sooner she takes out her propeller, and sends up her masts higher, and spreads her wings wider, the better for her.  That is, under such circumstances, modern improvements would be worse than useless; a sailing ship would be the best possible ship.  Or come nearer home.  Here is the Alabama, swift as the wind, the dread of every loyal merchantman.  How long would she remain a thing of terror, if she were shut out from all ports but her own, or if our ships were permitted to frequent British and French ports for her destruction, as she is permitted to frequent them for our destruction?  Or consider another case equally pertinent.  We are told, and no doubt truly, that the loss of Norfolk, at the commencement of the war, was an incalculable injury to us.  That is to say, the removal of our place of naval supply and repair only the few hundred miles which divide the Chesapeake from the Hudson was an untold loss.  Suppose it were removed as many thousand miles, what then?  One single fact, showing what, under the best of circumstances, is the difficulty and expense of modern warfare, is worth a thousand theories.  In 1857, then, it took two hundred thousand tons of coal to supply that part of the English fleet which was in the East,—­two hundred thousand tons to be brought from somewhere in sailing ships.  If ever a contest shall arise among great commercial powers, it will be seen that modern science has made new conditions, and that the first inexorable demand of modern warfare is coal depots, and docks and machine-shops, established in ports easy of access, and protected by natural and artificial strength, and scattered at easy distances all over the commercial world.  In short, men will appreciate better than they do now, that the right arm of naval warfare is not mail-clad steamers, but well-chosen colonies.