the benefit of her citizens, and the security of their commerce. It would be discreditable, as well as unsafe, to trust to a foreign power to keep down piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, or in the West Indies and in the China seas. As commerce extends, so does the necessity of its supervision and defence extend. The navy therefore requires augmentation, and for the reasons assigned in the late report of the Head of that Department, it may be inferred that it will have it, in reorganized and greatly improved efficiency. On this subject, the following are extracts, in substance, from a lecture delivered on the evening of February 3d, 1854, before the New York Mercantile Library Association, by the Hon. Mr. Stanton, of Tennessee, the chairman of the judiciary committee of the U. S. House of Representatives, and for a long time chairman of the naval committee of that body: “A strong naval power is the best promoter of commerce, and hence men engaged in commercial pursuits, cannot but feel an interest in the history of the rise and progress of that navy, to which the successes of their business undertakings are principally due. At a very early period, navies became an indispensable power in war. The later invention of ordnance, and the still more recent application of steam as a motive power to ships of war, render it at present a question of some difficulty, to predict the extent to which naval military power may hereafter arrive. “What we have to do in times of peace, is to maintain our naval force in the highest state of efficiency of which it is capable, and ready to enter upon action at a moment’s warning. With the lessons of the British war before us, it cannot be possible that the recent experiments of Lieutenant Dahlgren at Washington, and the discoveries which have resulted from them, will fail to prove of high practical service. But with all our appliances or discoveries in this regard, we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact, that we are behind other nations in all that concerns the structure of our ships. “We must have machinery and all proper appliances, as well as the raw materials, for the construction of a naval power when required. We must have independent establishments on both sides of the continent, to protect our Pacific as well as our Atlantic coasts, which should be connected by a railroad stretching across the breadth of the country. The requirements of commerce, and the advances which it has been making in increasing the facilities for navigation, will force us into improvements in our naval power, in order to uphold our commerce.