es of power unopposed; not the result of bold adventure without
check, or of simply American enterprise without the Government's aid.
Our foe is a wary, well-scarred, and well-tried old warrior, who has
the unequalled wisdom of experience, and the patient courage that has
triumphed over many defeats. The field has been in his hands for ten
generations, and he knows every byway, every marsh, every foot of
defense, and the few inassailable points to be preserved and guarded.
Great Britain, particularly, knows how essential is a large general
commerce for opening a market for her manufactures. She is dependent
on those manufactures, and upon the carrying trade of the world for a
living; and she fosters and protects them not alone by the reputed and
well-known individual enterprise and energy of her people, but by a
wise and forecasting policy of state, a mighty and irresistible naval
and military array, a wisely concerted, liberal, well-arranged, and
long-pursued steam system, and prompt, unflinching protection of
British subjects in their rights throughout the world.

Great Britain is prepared to resist our commercial progress, as she
has already done, step by step, by all the means within her power. She
has wisely brought steam to her aid, and now has a system of long
standing at last well matured. Her diplomacy has ever been conspicuous
throughout the world, for ability and zeal, whether in the ministerial
or consular service, and for its persistent advocacy of British rights
in trade as well as for its machinations against the extension of the
commerce or the power of this country. Such action on the part of any
wise rival nation is naturally to be expected; and all that we can
object to is that, seeing this policy and its inevitable tendency, our
country should stand still and suffer her trade to be paralyzed and
wrested from her, without an effort to relieve it, or the employment
of any of those commercial agencies and facilities which experience
shows to be all-efficient in such cases. It is utter folly for us to
maintain a simply passive competition; we must either progress or
retrograde. It is wrong to be willing to occupy a secondary place,
when nature and the common wants of the world so clearly indicate that
we should occupy the first; for if, as before assumed, foreign
commerce is our destiny, and if we can not accomplish our highest
capabilities except by commerce, then if we ever attain our true
dignity and