surprises of fresh naval invention by which the South, poor as were its possibilities for ship-building, might have rendered impotent, as once or twice it seemed likely to do, the Northern blockade. Gideon Welles, the responsible Cabinet Minister, was constant and would appear to have been capable at his task, but the inspiring mind of the Naval Department was found in Gustavus V. Fox, a retired naval officer, who at the beginning of Lincoln's administration was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The policy of blockade was begun by Lincoln's Proclamation on April 19, 1861. It was a hardy measure, certain to be a cause of friction with foreign Powers. The United States Government had contended in 1812 that a blockade which is to confer any rights against neutral commerce must be an effective blockade, and has not lately been inclined to take lax views upon such questions; but when it declared its blockade of the South it possessed only three steamships of war with which to make it effective. But the policy was stoutly maintained. The Naval Department at the very first set about buying merchant ships in Northern ports and adapting them to warlike use, and building ships of its own, in the design of which it shortly obtained the help of a Commission of Congress on the subject of ironclads. The Naval Department had at least the fullest support and encouragement from Lincoln in the whole of its policy. Everything goes to show that he followed naval affairs carefully, but that, as he found them conducted on sound lines by men that he trusted, his intervention in them was of a modest kind. Welles continued throughout the member of his Cabinet with whom he had the least friction, and was probably one of those Ministers, common in England, who earn the confidence of their own departments without in any way impressing the imagination of the public; and a letter by Lincoln to Fox immediately after the affair of Fort Sumter shows the hearty esteem and confidence with which from the first he regarded Fox. Of the few slight records of his judgment in these matters one is significant. The unfortunate expedition against Charleston in the spring of 1863 was undertaken with high hopes by the Naval Department; but Lincoln, we happen to know, never believed it could succeed. He has, rightly or wrongly, been blamed for dealings with his military officers in which he may be said to have spurred them hard; he cannot reasonably be blamed for giving the rein to his expert subordinates, because his own judgment, which differed from theirs, turned out right. This is one of very many instances which suggest that at the time when his confidence in himself was full grown his disposition, if any, to interfere was well under control. It is also one of the indications that his attention was alert in many matters in which his hand was not seen.