de, might seem to have refuted sufficiently and with
abundant illustration. To such doubters, before the war, there was
always ready the routine reply that a navy protected commerce; and
American shipping, then the second in the world, literally whitened
every sea with its snowy cotton sails, a distinctive mark at that time
of American merchant shipping. In my first long voyage, in 1859, from
Philadelphia to Brazil, it was no rare occurrence to be becalmed in
the doldrums in company with two or three of these beautiful
semi-clipper vessels, their low black hulls contrasting vividly with
the tall pyramids of dazzling canvas which rose above them. They
needed no protection then, and none foresaw that within a decade, by
the operations of a few small steam-cruisers, they would be swept from
the seas, never to return. Everything was taken for granted, and not
least that war was a barbarism of the past. From 1815 to 1850, the
lifetime of a generation, international peace had prevailed
substantially unbroken, despite numerous revolutionary movements
internal to the states concerned; and it had been lightly assumed that
these conditions would thenceforth continue, crowned as they had been
by the great sacrament of peace, when the nations for the first time
gathered under a common roof the fruits of their several industries in
the World's Exposition of 1851. The shadows of disunion were indeed
gathering over our own land, but for the most of us they carried with
them no fear of war. American fight American? Never! Separation there
might be, and with a common sorrow officers of both sections thought
of it; but, brother shed the blood of brother? No! By 1859 the Crimean
War had indeed intervened to shake these fond convictions; but, after
all, rules have exceptions, and in the succeeding peace the British
government, consistent with the prepossessions derived from the
propaganda of Cobden, yielded perfectly gratuitously the principle
that an enemy's commerce might be freely transported under a neutral
flag, thereby wrenching away prematurely one of the prongs of
Neptune's trident. Surely we were on the road to universal peace.

San Francisco before and after its recent earthquake--at this moment
of writing ten days ago--scarcely presented a greater contrast of
experience than that my day has known; and the political condition and
balance of the world now is as different from that of the period of
which I have been writing as the