of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness;
with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than
described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's
ragged regiment paraded the streets of Coventry."

There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some little
Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose
master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because
he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation.
The war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now
obsolete among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical
age whose spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the
Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman
was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty
of sinking ships with passengers and crew aboard, and very often he
played the gentleman in gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him
more abhorrent and incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown
women and children because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.

Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it was a
game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and the temptation
is to extol their audacious achievements while glossing over the
heavy losses which their own merchant marine suffered. The weakness
of privateering was that it was wholly offensive and could not, like
a strong navy, protect its own commerce from depredation. While the
Americans were capturing over seven hundred British vessels during the
first two years of the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were
taken or sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept
the Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes these
vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average amount of two
thousand pounds each and the loss to the American owners was, of course,
ever so much larger.

The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of history
to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy, with blockading
squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged armies on land which
retreated oftener than they fought, private armed ships dealt the
maritime prestige of Great Britain a far deadlier blow than the Dutch,
French, and Spanish were able to inflict. In England, there resulted
actual