"Oh, no," replied Haines; "not a ship-of-war every year, but a single one as soon as we could build her, after giving the eight hundred thousand dollars down."
"Oh, I understand," I answered. "Why didn't we take that eight hundred thousand dollars and build ships-of-war with it, and then go and blow the Algerines sky high?"
"That's what we ought to have done," said Haines, "and it's a big shame we didn't do it. What we did every other nation of Europe had been doing, and some of them for hundreds of years. It is like paying a chicken thief five dollars a month to let alone robbing your hen-roost."
"Well, if we've been paying twenty-five thousand dollars a year to the Dey of Algiers to let us alone, how is it that he is capturing our ships now?"
"We were not very prompt in making our payments, I believe," Haines answered; "and besides, them pagans don't pay any attention to their treaties. They make an agreement that is to last five or ten years, and get a certain amount of money; but when they've used that money up and want more they go to capturing our ships again, and simply tell us that they are out of money and must raise it somehow.
"I'm getting off the track a little," said Haines, after a pause, "as I promised to tell you how we owe our present navy to the Algerine pirates. The capture of our ships was a very bad blow to American commerce, as it drove the American flag out of the Mediterranean, and limited our trade altogether to the West Indies. Matters had come to a very bad state. Mr. Humphreys was appointed Commissioner for the United States in 1793, to negotiate with the Dey of Algiers. He was treated with great contempt by that chief of pirates, and what do you suppose the beggar said when he talked with the American about the business?"
"I don't know, I'm sure," was the reply of all of us.
"Well, he said, 'If I were to make peace with everybody what should I do with my corsairs? They would take off my head for the want of other prizes, not being able to live on their miserable allowance.'
"Mr. Humphreys did not waste any time in writing to President Washington and telling him what the barbarian scoundrel said, and he added this comment at the end of his letter. 'If we mean to have a commerce we must have a navy to defend it.'