though little developed, abounding in harbors and near rich
fishing-grounds. These physical conditions combined with an inborn
love of the sea, the pulse of that English blood which still beat in
their veins, to keep alive all those tendencies and pursuits upon
which a healthy sea power depends. Almost every one of the original
colonies was on the sea or on one of its great tributaries. All export
and import tended toward one coast. Interest in the sea and an
intelligent appreciation of the part it played in the public welfare
were easily and widely spread; and a motive more influential than care
for the public interest was also active, for the abundance of
ship-building materials and a relative fewness of other investments
made shipping a profitable private interest. How changed the present
condition is, all know. The centre of power is no longer on the
seaboard. Books and newspapers vie with one another in describing the
wonderful growth, and the still undeveloped riches, of the interior.
Capital there finds its best investments, labor its largest
opportunities. The frontiers are neglected and politically weak; the
Gulf and Pacific coasts actually so, the Atlantic coast relatively to
the central Mississippi Valley. When the day comes that shipping again
pays, when the three sea frontiers find that they are not only
militarily weak, but poorer for lack of national shipping, their
united efforts may avail to lay again the foundations of our sea
power. Till then, those who follow the limitations which lack of sea
power placed upon the career of France may mourn that their own
country is being led, by a like redundancy of home wealth, into the
same neglect of that great instrument.

Among modifying physical conditions may he noted a forum Like that of
Italy,--a long peninsula, with a central range of mountains dividing
it unto two narrow strips, along which the roads connecting the