n fighting behind entrenchments,--a teaching
renewed at New Orleans, and emphasized in the recent South African War.
The well-earned honors of the comparatively raw colonials received
generous recognition at the time from their opponents, even in the midst
of the bitterness proverbially attendant upon family quarrels; but it is
only just to allow that their endurance found its counterpart in the
resolute and persistent valor of the assailants. In these two battles,
with which the War of Independence may be said fairly to have begun, by
land and by water, in the far North and in the far South, the men of the
same stock, whose ancestors there met face to face as foes, have now in
peace a common heritage of glory. If little of bitterness remains in the
recollections which those who are now fellow-citizens retain of the
struggle between the North and the South, within the American Republic,
we of two different nations, who yet share a common tongue and a common
tradition of liberty and law, may well forget the wrongs of the earlier
strife, and look only to the common steadfast courage with which each
side then bore its share in a civil conflict.

The professional lives of these men, therefore, touch history in many
points; not merely history generally, but American history specifically.
Nor is this contact professional only, devoid of personal tinge. Hawke
was closely connected by blood with the Maryland family of Bladen; that
having been his mother's maiden name, and Governor Bladen of the then
colony being his first cousin. Very much of his early life was spent
upon the American Station, largely in Boston. But those were the days of
Walpole's peace policy; and when the maritime war, which the national
outcry at last compelled, attained large dimensions, Hawke's already
demonstrated eminence as a naval leader naturally led to his employment
in European waters, where the more immediate dangers, if not the
greatest interests, of Great Britain were then felt to be. The universal
character, as well as the decisive issues of the opening struggle were
as yet but dimly foreseen. Rodney also had family ties with America,
though somewhat more remote. Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration
of Independence from Delaware, was of the same stock; their
great-grandfathers were brothers. It was from the marriage of his
ancestor with the daughter of a Sir Thomas Caesar that the American
Rodney derived his otherwise singular name.

How