The Canadian privateers are even less known than the Provincial Marine. Yet they did a good deal of preying on the enemy at different times, and they amounted altogether to a total {182} which will probably surprise most students of Canadian history. At Halifax alone eighteen Nova Scotian privateers took out letters of marque against the French between 1756 and 1760, twelve more against the French between 1800 and 1805, and no less than forty-four against the Americans during the War of 1812. The century of peace which followed this war gradually came to be taken so much as a matter of course that Canadians forgot the lessons of the past and ignored the portents of the future. The very supremacy of a navy which protected them for nothing made them forget that without its guardian ships they could not have reached their Canadian nationality at all. Occasionally a threatened crisis would bring home to them some more intimate appreciation of British sea-power. But, for the rest, they took the Navy like the rising and the setting of the sun. The twentieth century opened on a rapidly changing naval world. British supremacy was no longer to go unchallenged, at least so far as preparation went. The German Emperor followed up his pronouncement, 'Our future is on the sea,' by vigorous action. For the first time in history a German navy became a powerful force, fit to lead, rather than to {183} follow, its Austrian and Italian allies. Also for the first time in history the New World developed a sea-power of first-class importance in the navy of the United States. And, again for the first time in history, the immemorial East produced a navy which annihilated the fleet of a European world-power when Japan beat Russia at Tsu-shima in the centennial year of Nelson at Trafalgar. These portentous changes finally roused the oversea dominions of the British Empire to some sense of the value of that navy which had been protecting them so efficiently and so long at the mother country's sole expense. But the dawn of naval truth broke slowly and, following the sun, went round from east to west. First it reached New Zealand, then Australia, then South Africa, and then, a long way last, Canada; though Canada was the oldest, the largest, the most highly favoured in population and resources, the richest, and the most expensively protected of them all.