No country newspaper in America, railing at Hull’s cowardice and treachery, showed less knowledge or judgment than the London “Times,” which had written of nothing but war since its name had been known in England. Any American could have assured the English press that British frigates before the “Guerriere” had struck to American; and even in England men had not forgotten the name of the British frigate “Serapis,” or that of the American captain Paul Jones. Yet the “Times’s” ignorance was less unreasonable than its requirement that Dacres should have gone down with his ship,--a cry of passion the more unjust to Dacres because he fought his ship as long as she could float. Such sensitiveness seemed extravagant in a society which had been hardened by centuries of warfare; yet the “Times” reflected fairly the feelings of Englishmen. George Canning, speaking in open Parliament not long afterward,[5] said that the loss of the “Guerriere” and the “Macedonian” produced a sensation in the country scarcely to be equalled by the most violent convulsions of Nature. “Neither can I agree with those who complain of the shock of consternation throughout Great Britain as having been greater than the occasion required.... It cannot be too deeply felt that the sacred spell of the invincibility of the British navy was broken by those unfortunate captures.” Of all spells that could be cast on a nation, that of believing itself invincible was perhaps the one most profitably broken; but the process of recovering its senses was agreeable to no nation, and to England, at that moment of distress, it was as painful as Canning described. The matter was not mended by the “Courier” and “Morning Post,” who, taking their tone from the Admiralty, complained of the enormous superiority of the American frigates, and called them “line-of-battle ships in disguise.” Certainly the American forty-four was a much heavier ship than the British thirty-eight, but the difference had been as well known in the British navy before these actions as it was afterward; and Captain Dacres himself, the Englishman who best knew the relative force of the ships, told his court of inquiry a different story:[6] “I am so well aware that the success of my opponent was owing to fortune, that it is my earnest wish, and would be the happiest period of my life, to be once more opposed to the ‘Constitution,’ with them [the old crew] under my command, in a frigate of similar force with the ‘Guerriere.’” After all had been said, the unpleasant result remained that in future British frigates, like other frigates, could safely fight only their inferiors in force. What applied to the “Guerriere” and “Macedonian” against the “Constitution” and “United States,” where the British force was inferior, applied equally to the “Frolic” against the “Wasp,” where no inferiority could be shown. The British newspapers thenceforward admitted what America wished to prove, that, ship for ship, British