The reason of these striking and unexpected successes was that our
navy in 1812 was the exact reverse of what our navy is now, in 1882.
I am not alluding to the personnel, which still remains excellent;
but, whereas we now have a large number of worthless vessels,
standing very low down in their respective classes, we then
possessed a few vessels, each unsurpassed by any foreign ship of
her class. To bring up our navy to the condition in which it stood
in 1812 it would not be _necessary_ (although in reality both very
wise and in the end very economical) to spend any more money than
at present; only instead of using it to patch up a hundred antiquated
hulks, it should be employed in building half a dozen ships on the
most effective model. If in 1812 our ships had borne the same relation
to the British ships that they do now, not all the courage and skill
of our sailors would have won us a single success. As it was, we
could only cope with the lower rates, and had no vessels to oppose
to the great "liners"; but to-day there is hardly any foreign ship,
no matter how low its rate, that is not superior to the corresponding
American ones. It is too much to hope that our political shortsightedness
will ever enable us to have a navy that is first-class in point of
size; but there certainly seems no reason why what ships we have
should not be of the very best quality. The effect of a victory is
two-fold, moral and material. Had we been as roughly handled on water
as we were on land during the first year of the war, such a succession
of disasters would have had a most demoralizing effect on the nation
at large. As it was, our victorious seafights, while they did not
inflict any material damage upon the colossal sea-might of England,
had the most important results in the feelings they produced at home
and even abroad. Of course they were magnified absurdly by most of
our writers at the time; but they do not need to be magnified, for