Mr. P. perfectly concurred in this opinion. He had frequently expressed it. But the gentleman from Pennsylvania says we have no money, and therefore we ought neither to have a navy nor any thing else, to defend ourselves at home or at sea. He tells the House that our revenue will not exceed ten millions, and that if we agree to have these ships built, we shall want twelve millions. Mr. P. trusted that if these two millions were wanted the ways and means will be found, rather than that we shall suffer our commerce to be destroyed, and lose all our credit as a nation abroad. Admitting, said Mr. P., that our debt is a hundred millions of dollars, it must be recollected that its increase has been owing to a number of causes which could not be avoided, amongst which was our war with the Indians, the Western insurrection, our treaty with Algiers, and the building of vessels for the protection of our commerce; but if our debt is fifteen millions more now than it was at the commencement of the present Government, our numbers have greatly increased since that time, so that he supposed, considering the number of individuals who have to bear it, it is not so heavy, in proportion to our population, as it was at that time. Having the ability, therefore, he trusted there would be found the will to provide a respectable naval force to protect us at home, our commerce abroad, and leave us in a situation to be more respected by foreign nations than we have heretofore been, and therefore hoped the present motion would be rejected.
Mr. Harper.—Notwithstanding, Mr. Chairman, the subject now before the committee, the usefulness of a Naval Establishment for the United States, has been so frequently and so fully discussed on former occasions, I deem it important to enter once more into a particular consideration of it, less on account of the general reasons so often urged against the measure, than of those particular objections, founded on the supposed state of our pecuniary resources, whereby it has, at this time, been assailed.
The gentleman from Pennsylvania has proved, as he thinks, that no possible navy could be equal to the protection of our commerce, extended as it is. And how has he proved this? By the example of other nations—of Holland, Spain, and Great Britain. Spain, he says, has a very considerable navy, perhaps the third in Europe, and yet no commerce. Holland found herself unable to support her navy, and even while she supported it, was unable to protect her trade; and therefore she gave it up, and yet, after she had done so, continued to possess a very great commerce. Even Britain, according to him, mistress of the ocean as she has been for a century past, has not fully protected her trade by her marine; which, in the mean time, has cost her more than the whole sum which her trade has yielded—and, therefore, she would have been better without a navy. This, Mr. Chairman, is the calculation of a schoolboy, not of a statesman; of the counting-house, not of the cabinet; and if the judgment of the gentleman from Pennsylvania were not warped on this, as on so many other occasions, by his particular political system, he would be one of the last persons in the world to present the subject in a point of view so much beneath a mind of the least political discernment. The gentleman, in fact, forgets that Britain is indebted to her navy, not for her commerce only, but for her independence; not only for the dominion of the seas, but for her existence as a nation. Every man, who is in the smallest degree versed in history, knows that Great Britain, but for her navy, must long since have been a province of France. Had not Britain been mistress of the ocean, France would long since have been not only her mistress, but mistress of the rest of Europe. That great people, uniting within itself all the sources of military, pecuniary, and maritime strength, has never ceased to contend for universal empire, with immense means, vast genius, boundless ambition and unwearied perseverance, since the period when, two centuries ago, its provinces became united under one Government, and its immense resources, managed and called into activity by a minister whose mind was equal to his station, were directed to the increase of its power and extension of its limits. How has Britain been enabled to check this formidable career, to maintain her own power, and to arrive at her present high pitch of consequence in the scale of nations? Not by her population, which is little more than one-third of that possessed by France; nor by her insular situation, which heretofore could not protect her from invasion and conquest; nor by her military power, which, when compared with that of France, has never been considerable—but by her navy. It was that navy, and the wealth which commerce, protected by it, poured into her lap, that enabled her to support with glory so unequal a contest, to call to her aid the military force of Germany, and thus to establish a counterpoise to the power of France. But for this naval force, and the commerce which it protected and cherished—but for this union, cemented by the money, and aided by the maritime preponderance of England—France, combining, as she did, greater means of strength of every kind than any other nation, or even than all the nations of Europe united, except Germany and Great Britain, must long since have established her dominion over all. England must have fallen first, being unable, without the command of the sea, to save herself from invasion; and then the powers of the Continent, deprived of the pecuniary aid wherewith England was enabled by her commerce, under the protection of her navy, to supply and unite them, would have bent, one after another, beneath her formidable and continually augmenting strength. Even now this same navy enables England to ride secure amidst the most terrible storm wherewith the political world has ever been afflicted; to brave all the tremendous dangers by which she has been threatened; to baffle every attempt against her safety, or that of her remotest possessions; and amidst the dismay, the humiliation, or the total overthrow of so many powers, to triumph over her rival, whose strength, always formidable, is exercised, not more by her extension of territory and of influence, than by the consternation wherewith her successes have stricken other States, by the disunion and feebleness which has characterized their counsels, by the terrible weapon of internal commotion with which she threatens, or has actually assailed them, and by the unheard of despotism of her own Government, which enables it to employ, in a degree hitherto unexampled in the history of civilized men, the physical forces of the nation, in executing its plans of plunder and conquest. This same navy enables England not only to maintain thus gloriously a conflict so dreadful and so unequal, but to stand the barrier between independence and universal dominion, between liberty and the most degrading despotism, between civilization and the barbarism of the dark ages—to become the citadel of property, the storehouse and the banker of the world, and to render all nations, with their own consent, tributary, by means of her commerce, to the support of her greatness.
What, then, Mr. Chairman, must we think of that political system which estimates the British navy by a calculation of the sums which it has cost to maintain it; forgetting that, without this navy, there would have been no wealth to supply these sums, and, perhaps, no nation to pay them; that without this navy, Great Britain, instead of holding her present exalted station among the powers of the earth, must long since have sunk into a secondary and unimportant State; and, probably, into the condition of a province of that very rival against whom she now so nobly and so gloriously contends! Is it too much to say of such a calculation, that it is a paltry calculation, unworthy of a statesman, and befitting only a schoolboy?
But even the navy of Great Britain, the gentleman from Pennsylvania has told us, formidable as it is, has not afforded complete protection to her commerce. How, then, he asks, can we expect to protect our commerce by a navy? If the gentleman means by "protection" the total prevention of captures at sea, it is certain that no nation ever did, or ever can protect its commerce, in that scale. But that is not the true idea of "protection," which means nothing more than such a degree of safety as may enable the merchants of a nation, taken as a body, to pursue their commercial enterprises without discouragement, or eventual loss. This is all the protection that is ever attempted, or that is necessary; and this, I contend, we have it in our power to give.
Respecting the navy of Holland, the gentleman from Pennsylvania falls into a mistake equally remarkable. Holland, he tells us, has no navy, and yet maintains a very great commerce. Formerly she had a navy, but could not maintain it, and was forced to give it up. But where did that gentleman learn that Holland has no navy? Had she no navy in the American war, when with great gallantry, though with unequal success, she fought the English at sea? Had she no navy when she fitted out the formidable armament under De Winter, in October, 1797, which, after a dreadful conflict, was defeated rather by the superior address of the British Admiral, than the superior force or bravery of his fleet? Do we not know, that even now, after this fatal defeat, she possesses, in her different harbors, a much more numerous fleet than is proposed by the present bill for the United States? How then could the gentleman from Pennsylvania say that Holland has no navy? He ought to have known that until the marine of France and Spain were destroyed, in the present war, that of Holland was sufficient to turn the scale in their favor and against England; which gave her not only security for her commerce, but respectability and weight among the maritime powers of Europe.
As to the other assertion of the gentleman from Pennsylvania, that Holland a long time ago found her navy too burdensome for her resources, and therefore gave it up, it is equally erroneous. Holland, as we have seen, never gave up her navy, and even now, exhausted and ruined as she is by French fraternity and internal revolution, maintains a much greater one than is proposed for the United States. There is, indeed, a period in her history, the close of the last and the beginning of the present century, when she ceased to be ranked with the first maritime powers of Europe; but that happened, not through the want of means, but a mistake in policy. Before that period her system had been wholly maritime. All her resources were applied to her navy. A maritime armed neutrality was her great object, and she long preserved it with success. Her commerce, fostered by her marine, spread over every sea; and the Northern maritime States, guided to the same policy by her influence, acknowledged her as their umpire, their mediator, and their safeguard. The great powers courted her alliance and respected her rights. She interfered with weight in their disputes. Her village of the Hague became the centre of their most important negotiations. She disputed the empire of the seas with them singly; and, at one time, she held the united forces of France and England in check at sea, and finally compelled the French armies to retreat from her territory, which they had overrun and occupied. All this she effected by means of her navy, and of the resources which it had furnished to her by the protection of her commerce.
At this period she altered her system, and instead of cherishing her marine, and confining herself solely to the maintenance of her commerce, by an armed maritime neutrality at the head of the Northern Powers, she engaged in the land wars of the great military powers, and made exertions disproportionate to her strength, whereby her resources were exhausted. Into this fatal mistake she was drawn by the aspiring ambition, the popularity, and the heroism of one of her own citizens, stimulated and aided by the aggressions, the insults, and the alarming encroachments of the French Monarch, Louis XIV., at the zenith of his glory, evidently aspiring to universal dominion. William III., placed by his birth and personal merit at the head of the Dutch nation, saw those objects of French ambition, and roused his own country to resistance. Called, at length, to the Government of England, he communicated to that nation his own martial ardor. He finally succeeded in forming a confederacy to check the progress of France. Of this confederacy, Holland, his native country, was induced by his influence to become a principal member. At the head of it he struggled against the power of France, with unequal means, and sometimes with unprosperous fortune, but with a genius and perseverance not to be subdued, and a heroism rarely to be equalled. After his death, the impulse which his mind had given to his own and other countries continued to be felt, and the confederacy was renewed under his successor, on a different occasion, but with the same views. At length its object was altered. France was completely humbled and Europe secured against her enterprises, but the strength of Holland was undermined in the struggle. The vast armies which she had kept up had loaded her with debts. Her operations for so many years, by land, had drawn off her attention from her marine; and from that moment it declined, while that of England rose gradually on its ruins.
Hence, Mr. Chairman, the downfall of the maritime greatness of Holland. Her resources were not equal to the maintenance of fleets and armies, of both maritime and military strength. While she was left to attend solely to her maritime concerns, she continued to be powerful, respected, and prosperous; but her situation on the Continent, in the neighborhood of a great and ambitious military power, drew her, perhaps unnecessarily, into land wars, to which her strength was unequal, and, of course, her naval power declined. But still she continued for a century to keep up a navy sufficient to form a considerable weight in the scale, and to secure attention to her rights as a nation; and under this security her commerce continued to flourish, in a greater or less degree, till a domestic revolution, aiding and aided by foreign oppression, dried up all its sources.
What, then, Mr. Chairman, is the instruction which we may draw from this example? A nation whose population never exceeded two millions and a half, and whose territory, compared with ours, is but a mere speck on the surface of the globe, a mere garden spot, was able to maintain a most formidable marine, while it attended to that object solely, to extend its commerce under the protection of this marine, and to maintain not only an equal, but a distinguished rank, among the great powers of Europe, by whose territories it was surrounded, and by whose formidable armies it was liable to be invaded. Even this nation, after a mistake in its policy, or the pressure of inevitable circumstances, it had been induced to divert its attention from its marine to land wars, to exhaust its resources, and burden itself with debts too great for its means, by these disproportionate efforts, still was able to preserve a navy sufficient to give respectability to its flag, and a degree of safety to its commerce. Even now, when its resources are dried up by anarchy, or diverted by foreign exaction into the coffers of another nation; when its territory is curtailed, and its population reduced to one million and a half; when it is compelled to maintain an army of 25,000 men for France, still it has a navy greater than we propose. Shall it, then, be said, that this country, with probably six millions of population, most rapidly increasing, with an extent of territory capable of containing fifty millions, with a commerce greater than that of Holland ever was, and with more tonnage and sailors than she ever possessed, is not able to support such a navy as she, even since the commencement of her downfall, has always supported, and still supports? Yes, it is said by the gentleman from Pennsylvania; but the good sense of this House and of this country will, I trust, correct his mistake, as it has so often done heretofore.