"Our navigation involves still higher consideration; as a branch of industry it is valuable; but as a resource of defense, it is essential.
"The position and circumstances of the United States leaves them nothing to fear from their land board, and nothing to desire beyond their present rights.
"But on the seaboard they are open to injury, and they have then, too, a commerce which must be protected.
"This can only be done by possessing a respectable body of artists and citizen seamen, and establishments in readiness for shipbuilding.
"If particular Nations grasp at undue shares of our commerce, and more especially, if they seize on the means of the United States, to convert them into aliment for their own strength, and withdraw them entirely from the support of those to whom they belong, defensive and protective measures become necessary on the part of the Nation whose marine sources are thus invaded, or it will be disarmed of its defense, its productions will be at the mercy of the Nation which has possessed itself exclusively of the means of carrying them, and its politics may be influenced by those who command its commerce.
"The carriage of our own commodities, if once established in another channel, cannot be resumed at the moment we desire.
"If we lose the seamen and artists whom it now employs, we lose the present means of Marine defense, and time will be requisite to raise up others, when disgrace or losses shall bring home to our feelings the evils of having abandoned them."
The "disgrace and losses" incurred by our ancestors in this brief but disastrous campaign, had indeed brought "home to their feelings the evils of having abandoned" the great interest thus earnestly pleaded for by the greatest statesman of his day; and the absurd folly of the so-called "economy," which prompted its abandonment, was at length reluctantly conceded by the noisiest and bitterest advocates of free trade throughout the land.
THE END.