As soon as they were thus allowed to do so, English shipowners ordered clippers from our shipyards, and putting them into profitable employment under their own flag, kept on with their business, sharing with us the supremacy of the seas, which but for the timely action of their government they would inevitably have lost. In this way they maintained it until there came a new era in shipbuilding, when circumstances becoming reversed, their mechanics were enabled to accomplish what ours could not, in the construction of iron screw steamships. Had Congress then been as wise as Parliament was in 1849, our shipowners would, in their turn, have maintained their prestige by supplying themselves from abroad with the new vehicles of commerce they could not procure at home, and we should never have heard of "decadence." Instead of such obviously judicious action, it has done nothing but condemn us year after year to enforced idleness in the name of "protection." So we have endeavored to compete with these new motors on the sea by means of wooden sailing ships and paddle steamers, until they are of service only in our coastwise monopoly or rotting at the docks, if not broken up. We have gone on steadily protecting ourselves to death, and protecting England and Germany, the chief of our rivals, to life at our own expense of vitality. England's justice to her shipowners, which at first seemed harshness to her shipbuilders, was eventually the means of their prosperity. It set them to "finding out knowledge of witty inventions," and now they have one hundredfold the capital invested and labor employed in iron steamship building, more than ever found occupation in their old shipyards.