least six mail-clad steam
frigates, twelve steam sloops-of-war, and twelve steam gun-boats,
with similar armor. It will require also for long voyages and
distant stations a dozen steam frigates of wood, and as many steam
sloops-of-war, like the best now in our service; and, with the materials
and armament now on hand, an outlay of twenty-five or thirty millions
well applied may suffice for the construction of the whole. With such a
provision we need feel no solicitude as to the intervention of England
or France in our domestic affairs.

The lighter steamships of wood will answer for long voyages to the
Mediterranean, the coast of Africa, India, and the Pacific, and will
protect our grain, flour, and corn, on their way from the West to
Europe. Our iron steamers will defend our commercial cities from attack
or blockade; they will level all rebel batteries on the waters of the
Chesapeake; they can batter down the fortresses of the Southern coast,
and restore to commerce the ports of Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola,
Mobile, Apalachicola, New Orleans, and Galveston.

Most fortunately for our country, at a moment when we cannot immediately
command the live oak of Georgia and Florida, the oak plank of Virginia,
or the yellow pine of the Carolinas, we have the most abundant supplies
of iron easily accessible, and now, relieved from the demands of
railways and factories, ready for the construction of our iron navy. The
iron plates of Pennsylvania and Maryland in strength and toughness know
no superior. The iron mountain near St. Louis and the mines on Lake
Champlain furnish also an article of great purity and excellence. But,
choice as are these deposits of iron, they are all surpassed by the more
recent discoveries on Lake Superior, now opened by the ship-canal at the
Straits of St. Mary. There Nature has stored an inexhaustible amount of
the richest iron ore, free from sulphur, phosphorus, arsenic, and other
deleterious substances, protruding above the surface of hillocks and
underlying the country for miles in extent. This ore is of the specular
and magnetic kind, yields sixty-five per cent. of iron of remarkable
purity, is easily mined and transported to the Lake, and is shipped in
vast quantities to the ports of Lake Erie, where it meets the coal of
Ohio. At least ten companies are now engaged in its shipment, which
has progressed thus far with great rapidity, doubling every year. The
shipments from Lake Superior, in 1858,