e strength of her
possible enemies. As for the people of the United States, he opines that
they know their own business. They are best able to judge how many ships
and how many men under arms will serve their purpose. England would,
indeed, be glad to see the United States with a few more ships than she
has, but--it is none of England's business. Englishmen can only wish her
luck and hope that she is making no mistake in her calculations and go
on about their own affairs, which are pressing enough. At the same time
if the United States should prove to have miscalculated and should ever
need . . .--well, England has a ship or two herself.

It would be a gain for the world if Americans would only understand!

* * * * *

The Englishman of the present generation knows practically nothing of
the Americans as a maritime nation; and again let me say that this
arises not from superciliousness or any intentional neglect, but merely
from the fact that the matter is one beyond his horizon. He is so
familiar with the fact that Britain rules the waves that he has no
notion that whenever opportunity of comparison has offered the Americans
have generally shown themselves (if there has been anything to choose)
the better sailors of the two. Every English reader will probably read
that sentence again to see if he has not misunderstood it. The truth is
that Englishmen have forgotten the incidents of the Revolutionary War
almost as completely as they have forgotten those of the War of 1812;
Paul Jones is as meaningless a name to them as Andrew Jackson. While it
is true that American historians have given the American people, up to
the present generation, an unfortunately exaggerated idea of the heroism
of the patriot forces and have held the British troops up to all manner
of unmerited odium, it is also true that English historians, while the
less partial of the two, have perhaps been over-careful not to err in
the same direction. Not until the last twenty years--hardly until the
last four or five--have there been accessible to the public of the two
countries the materials for forming a just judgment on the incidents of
the war. It must be confessed that there is at least nothing in the
evidence to permit the Englishman to think that a hundred years ago the
home-bred Briton could either sail or fight his ships better than the
Colonial. Nor has the Englishman as a rule any idea that in the middle
of the nin