That the United States Navy within the last dozen years should have
been recast almost wholly, upon more modern lines, is not, in itself
alone, a fact that should cause comment, or give rise to questions
about its future career or sphere of action. If this country needs, or
ever shall need, a navy at all, indisputably in 1883 the hour had come
when the time-worn hulks of that day, mostly the honored but
superannuated survivors of the civil war, should drop out of the
ranks, submit to well-earned retirement or inevitable dissolution, and
allow their places to be taken by other vessels, capable of performing
the duties to which they themselves were no longer adequate.

It is therefore unlikely that there underlay this re-creation of the
navy--for such in truth it was--any more recondite cause than the
urgent necessity of possessing tools wholly fit for the work which
war-ships are called upon to do. The thing had to be done, if the
national fleet was to be other than an impotent parody of naval force,
a costly effigy of straw. But, concurrently with the process of
rebuilding, there has been concentrated upon the development of the
new service a degree of attention, greater than can be attributed even
to the voracious curiosity of this age of newsmongering and of
interviewers. This attention in some quarters is undisguisedly
reluctant and hostile, in others not only friendly but expectant, in
both cases betraying a latent impression that there is, between the
appearance of the new-comer and the era upon which we now are
entering, something in common. If such coincidence there be, however,
it is indicative not of a deliberate purpose, but of a commencing
change of conditions, economical and political, throughout the world,
with which sea power, in the broad sense of the phrase, will be
associated closely; not, indeed, as the cause, nor even chiefly as a
result, but rather as the leading characteristic of activities which