t
helped to spread law and justice in the world; and, at the end of all
this, it was as ready as ever to meet the foe.

Sometimes it acted alone; but much oftener with the Army in joint
expeditions, as it had for centuries. And here let us remind ourselves
again that the Navy by itself could no more have made the Empire than
the Army could alone. The United Service of both was needed for such
work in the past, just as the United Service of these and of the Royal
Air Force will be needed to defend the Empire in the future. Nor is
this all we must remember; for the fighting Services draw their own
strength from the strength of the whole people. So, whenever we talk
of how this great empire of the free was won and is to be defended, let
us never forget that it needed and it needs the patriotic service of
every man and woman, boy and girl, whether in the fighting Services by
sea and land and air or among those remaining quietly at home. One for
all, and all for one.

The Navy's first work after the peace of 1815 was to destroy the
stronghold of the Dey of Algiers, who was a tyrant, enslaver, and
pirate in one. This released thousands of Christian slaves and broke
up Algerian slavery for ever. A few years later (1827) the French and
British fleets, now happily allied, sank the Turkish fleet at Navarino,
because the Sultan was threatening to kill off the Greeks. Then the
Navy sent the Pasha of Egypt fleeing out of Beirut and Acre in Syria,
closed in on Alexandria, and forced him to stop bullying the people of
the whole Near East.

By this time (1840) steam had begun to be used in British men-of-war.
But the first steamer in the world that ever fired a shot in action,
and the first to cross any ocean under steam the whole way, was built
at Quebec in 1831. This was the famous _Royal William_, which steamed
from Pictou (in Nova Scotia) to London in 1833, and which, on the 5th
of May, 1836, in the Bay of San Sebastian, fired the first shot ever
fired in battle from a warship under steam. She had been sold to the
Spanish Government for use against the Carlists, who were the same sort
of curse to Spain that the Stuarts were to Britain, and was then
leading the British Auxiliary Steam Squadron under Commodore Henry.
(The American _Savannah_ is often said to have crossed the Atlantic
under steam in 1819. But her log (ship's diary) proves that she
steamed only eighty hours during her voyage of a month.)

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