besides their crews, and with the known power
of defying wind and wave, and throwing an army in full equipment for
the field, within a few days, on any coast of Europe.

It is remarkable that the use of the navy, as a great branch of the
military power of England, had been scarcely contemplated until the
last century. Though the sea-coast of England, the largest of any
European state, and the national habits of an insular country, might
have pointed out this direction for the national energies from the
earliest period, yet England was a kingdom for five hundred years
before she seems to have thought of the use of ships as an instrument
of public power. In the long war with France during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, the ships were almost wholly mercantile; and,
when employed in wars, were chiefly employed as transports to throw
our troops on the French soil. It was the reign of Elizabeth, that
true birth of the progress of England, that first developed the powers
of an armed navy. The Spanish invasion forced the country to meet the
Armada by means like its own; and the triumph, though won by a higher
agency, and due to the winds and waves, or rather to the Supreme
Providence which watched over the land of Protestantism, awoke the
nation to the true faculty of defence; and from that period alone
could the burden of the fine national song be realized, and Britain
was to "rule the main." The expeditions against the Spanish West
Indies, and the new ardour of discovery in regions where brilliant
fable lent its aid to rational curiosity, carried on the process of
naval power. The war against Holland, under Charles II., though
disastrous and impolitic, showed at least that the fleet of England
was the true arm of its strength; and the humiliation of the only
rival of her commerce at once taught her where the sinews of war lay,
and by what means the foundations of naval empire were to be laid. But
it was not until the close of the last century that the truth came
before the nation in its full form. The American war--a war of
skirmishes--had its direct effect, perhaps its providential purpose,
in compelling England to prepare for the tremendous collision which
was so soon to follow, and which was to be the final security of the
Continent itself. It was then, for the first time, that the nation was
driven to the use of a navy on a great scale. The war, lying on the
western shore of an ocean, made the use of naval armam