iously answers the patriotic
American:--"We should not pay. We should invent a Columbiad in Pittsburg
or--or anywhere else, and blow any outsider into h--l."

They might invent. They might lay waste their cities and retire inland,
for they can subsist entirely on their own produce. Meantime, in a war
waged the only way it could be waged by an unscrupulous Power, their
coast cities and their dock-yards would be ashes. They could construct
their navy inland if they liked, but you could never bring a ship down
to the water-ways, as they stand now.

They could not, with an ordinary water patrol, despatch one regiment
of men six miles across the seas. There would be about five million
excessively angry, armed men pent up within American limits. These men
would require ships to get themselves afloat. The country has no such
ships, and until the ships were built New York need not be allowed a
single-wheeled carriage within her limits.

Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no fear.
There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her seaboard
alone--plunder that would enrich a nation--and she has neither a navy
nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the whole. No man catches a
snake by the tail, because the creature will sting; but you can build a
fire around a snake that will make it squirm.

The country is supposed to be building a navy now. When the ships are
completed her alliance will be worth having--if the alliance of any
republic can be relied upon. For the next three years she can be hurt,
and badly hurt. Pity it is that she is of our own blood, looking at the
matter from a Pindarris point of view. Dog cannot eat dog.

These sinful reflections were prompted by the sight of the beautifully
unprotected condition of Buffalo--a city that could be made to pay up
five million dollars without feeling it. There are her companies of
infantry in a sort of port there. A gun-boat brought over in pieces from
Niagara could get the money and get away before she could be caught,
while an unarmored gun-boat guarding Toronto could ravage the towns on
the lakes. When one hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth,
it is, to say the least of it, surprising to find her so temptingly
spankable.

The average American citizen seems to have a notion that any Power
engaged in strife with the Star Spangled Banner will disembark men from
flat-bottomed boats on a convenient beach for the purpose of b