It has been the fashion of late years to sneer at our second war with England as unnecessary and inconclusive.  But no one who studies the records of the life, industry, and material interests of our people during the years between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of that war can fail to wonder that it did not come sooner, and that it was not a war with France as well as England.  For our people were then essentially a maritime people.  Their greatest single manufacturing industry was ship-building.  The fisheries—­whale, herring, and cod—­employed thousands of their men and supported more than one considerable town.  The markets for their products lay beyond seas, and for their commerce an undisputed right to the peaceful passage of the ocean was necessary.  Yet England and France, prosecuting their own quarrel, fairly ground American shipping as between two millstones.  Our sailors were pressed, our ships seized, their cargoes stolen, under hollow forms of law.  The high seas were treated as though they were the hunting preserves of these nations and American ships were quail and rabbits.  The London “Naval Chronicle” at that time, and for long after, bore at the head of its columns the boastful lines: 

    “The sea and waves are Britain’s broad domain,
     And not a sail but by permission spreads.”

And France, while vigorously denying the maxim in so far as it related to British domination, was not able to see that the ocean could be no one nation’s domain, but must belong equally to all.  It was the time when the French were eloquently discoursing of the rights of man; but they did not appear to regard the peaceful navigation of the ocean as one of those rights; they were preaching of the virtues of the American republic, but their rulers issued orders and decrees that nearly brought the two governments to the point of actual war.  But the very fact that France and England were almost equally arrogant and aggressive delayed the formal declaration of hostilities.  Within the United States two political parties—­the Federalists and the Republicans—­were struggling for mastery.  The one defended, though half-heartedly, the British, and demanded drastic action against the French spoliators.  The other denounced British insolence and extolled our ancient allies and brothers in republicanism, the French.  While the politicians quarreled the British stole our sailors and the French stole our ships.  In 1798 our, then infant, navy gave bold resistance to the French ships, and for a time a quasi-war was waged on the ocean, in which the frigates “Constitution” and “Constellation” laid the foundation for that fame which they were to finally achieve in the war with Great Britain in 1812.  No actual war with France grew out of her aggressions.  The Republicans came into power in the United States, and by diplomacy averted an actual conflict.  But the American shipping interests suffered sadly meanwhile.  The money finally paid by France as indemnity for her unwarranted spoliations lay long undivided in the United States Treasury, and the easy-going labor of urging and adjudicating French spoliation claims furnished employment to some generations of politicians after the despoiled seamen and shipowners had gone down into their graves.