ater was beaten by the ships of one
little isle of the sea. In the statement itself you have the explanation.
The ships were from an isle of the sea. The men who manned them were born
within sight of the ocean. In their childhood they sported with its waves.
At twelve they were cabin-boys. At twenty, thorough seamen. Against the
skill born of such an experience, of what avail was mere courage, however
fiery?

A similar train of remarks may with truth be made about our Northern and
Southern States. No doubt, the Rebel Government may send to England and
purchase swift steamers like the Alabama, and man them with the reckless
outcasts of every nationality, and send them forth to prey like pirates
upon defenceless commerce. No doubt, in their hate, the Rebels may build
sea-monsters like the Merrimack, or the Arkansas, or those cotton-mailed
steamers at Galveston, and make all stand aghast at some temporary
disaster. These things are unpleasant, but they are unavoidable.
Desperation has its own peculiar resources. But these things do not alter
the law. The North is thoroughly maritime, and in the end must possess a
solid and permanent supremacy on the sea. The men of Cape Cod, the
fishermen of Cape Ann, and the hardy sailors who swarm from the hundred
islands and bays of Maine, are not to be driven from their own element by
the proud planters of the South. Naval habits and naval strength go hand
in hand. And in estimating the resources of any power, the first question
is, Has she sailors,--not men of the land, but men of the sea?

* * * * *

There is a _second_ question, equally important. What is a nation's
capacity for naval production? What ship-yards has it? What docks? What
machine-shops? What stores of timber, iron, and hemp? And what skilled
workmen to make these resources available? A nation is not strong simply
because it has a hundred ships complete and armed floating on its waters.
"Iron and steel will bend and break," runs the old nursery-tale. And
practice shows that iron and steel wrought into ships have no better
fortune, and that the stoutest barks will strand and founder, or else
decay, and, amid the sharp exigencies of war, with wonderful rapidity. Not
what a nation has, then, but how soon it can fill up these gaps of war,
how great is its capacity to produce and reproduce, tells the story of its
naval power.

When Louis Napoleon completed that triumph of skill and labor, t