Besides the legislative incapacity just mentioned, and the equally inept legislation which for ten years or more had quarrelled over carrying slavery into impossible regions, our administrative departments were absurdly inefficient and, in the case of the War Department, corrupt, in that the Secretary of War had steadily been distributing arms, such as they were, in the South. Never did the government of a great country go to war under such conditions of ineptitude as did ours. Buchanan’s effort to reinforce Fort Sumter had come to grief through the folly of General Scott, who had caused the change from the heavily armed war-steamer, _Brooklyn_, lying at Fort Monroe, to the merchant steamer, _Star of the West_. Had the _Brooklyn_ gone, as was intended, the Confederates would not have dared to fire upon her. Had they done so, the raw militia which had never before fired a cannon would have been driven from their improvised battery, and Charleston harbor would have been ours permanently. It was the same when Mr. Lincoln made the second effort and the _Powhatan_ was diverted to Pensacola through the officiousness of the Secretary of State, who meddled with affairs with which he had nothing to do and caused orders to be sent to the _Powhatan_ without the knowledge of the Secretary of the Navy. Our officers from the South resigned by scores, and our Southern navy yards, Norfolk and Pensacola, left under the command of aged officers, were surrendered with enormous loss, particularly in cannon, many hundreds of which thus went to arm the Southern batteries on the coast and more particularly on the Mississippi. The following ships were burned and scuttled at Norfolk on April 20, 1861: the _Pennsylvania_, 120; _Columbus_, 74; _Delaware_, 74; _Raritan_, 44; _Columbia_, 44; _Merrimac_, 40; _Germantown_, 20; _Plymouth_, 20, and _Dolphin_, 10. All but the _Merrimac_ were sailing ships and thus, with this exception, no great loss. General Scott, weakened by age, was still commander-in-chief, and failed to man the Southern forts, which, properly, should have been done in the first days of secession, and every port of the South thus held by the Federal Government. In such case there could have been no war. As it was, a few militia marched in and took possession against what was only, in most cases, a sergeant-in-charge. Never was any government so thoroughly inefficient, and it was the inefficiency of years of ineptitude, not of a day.