On the twenty-second day of December, 1775, the navy of the United States was born on the waters of our Delaware. On that day Esek Hopkins, of Rhode Island, was placed in command of a little fleet of eight vessels--two of them ships, two of them brigs, the others very much smaller. The English officers sneered in derision at "the fleet of whaleboats." The rattlesnake flag--a yellow flag with a pine tree in the centre and a rattlesnake coiled beneath its branches, with the words "Don't tread on me"--was run to the masthead of the _Providence_, being hauled there by the hands of the first lieutenant, John Paul Jones. That little fleet of eight vessels, mounting only 114 guns, was sent forth to confront a naval power of 112 battleships with 3,714 guns--not a single gun of ours throwing a ball heavier than nine pounds, while five hundred of the English guns threw a weight of metal of double that amount. Wasn't it an audacious thing? Why, it seems to me one of the marvels of human history when I reflect upon what was attempted by the Americans of 1776. Look at the situation. Thirteen different colonies strung along a narrow strip of coast; three thousand miles of rolling ocean on the one side and three thousand miles of impenetrable wilderness on the other; colonies with infinite diversity of interests--diverse in blood, diverse in conditions of society, diverse in ambition, diverse in pursuits--the English Puritan on the rock of Plymouth, the Knickerbocker Dutch on the shores of the Hudson, the Jersey Quaker on the other side of the Delaware, the Swede extending from here to Wilmington, Maryland bisected by our great bay of the Chesapeake, Virginia cut in half by the same water way, North Carolina and South Carolina lying south of impenetrable swamps as inaccessible to communication as a range of mountains, and farther south the sparsely-settled colony of Georgia. Huguenot, Cavalier, Catholic, Quaker, Dutchman, Puritan, Mennonite, Moravian, and Church of England men; and yet, under the hammer stroke of British oppression, thirteen colonies were welded into one thunderbolt, which was launched at the throne of George III.