Three elements enter into the fighting efficiency of nations at war:  the strength of their navies, the strength of their armies and the condition of their coast defences.  For the first time in many years general attention of the people of the United States was centered upon these conditions when the outbreak of hostilities began to threaten.  Inasmuch as it was an admitted fact that most of the fighting would be done at sea, or at least that the efficiency of our fleets would be the most important factor, most of the attention was directed to a study of the navy.

The constructions of what we call the new navy of the United States, “the white squadron,” which has placed us sixth in the rank of the naval powers of the world, instead of so far down that we were scarcely to be counted at all, has all been done in less than twelve years.  It may be that to stand sixth in rank is not yet high enough, but the progress of a single decade certainly is remarkable.

After the Civil War, when hostilities on our own coast and complications abroad seemed to be at an end, the care of the navy was abandoned and ships were sold with scarcely a protest, almost as entirely as had been done eighty years before, at the end of the Revolution.  There was even less reason for this policy, because in 1785 the country was poor and needed the money the ships brought, while in the twenty years following the Civil War there was no such excuse of national poverty.  By 1885 there was no United States navy at all worthy the name, for the wooden vessels on the list, with their obsolete guns, were of no value whatever in the event of hostilities with a foreign power that had kept up its equipment with rifled guns and ironclads.

The movement to repair the decay began when, in 1881, Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt appointed the first advisory board, presided over by Rear-Admiral John Bodgers, “to determine the requirements of a new navy.”  This board reported that the United States should have twenty-one battleships, seventy unarmored cruisers of various sizes and types, twenty torpedo boats, five rams and five torpedo gunboats, all to be built of steel.  The report was received by Congress and the country with the attention it merited, but to get the work started was another matter.

Policy of the economists.

The economists had been praising the policy of idleness in naval construction, claiming first that we were at peace and did not need to spend money on expensive vessels and, next, that naval construction was in an experimental stage and that we should let the European nations go to the expense of the experiments, as they were doing, and when some result had been reached, take advantage of it, instead of wasting our own money in work that would have to be thrown away in a few years.

When the country became convinced that a navy was needed, it was found that we could not follow out that pleasant little theory.  Our naval authorities could not obtain the facts and the experience they wanted from other nations, and our shipyards could not build even one of the armored ships.  We could not roll even the thinnest of modern armor-plates, and could not make a gun that was worth mounting on a modern vessel if we had it.