The end of the “Brothers’ War” had made of the United States a nation. Our country took its place in the world, and its fleets again reached into every sea. But the lessons of the navy had not touched the dull minds which in June, 1860, had voted down the supplies of the little navy which was to expand so greatly in the four succeeding years. To such, the whole work of defeating the Confederacy appeared to be the more spectacular work of the army. The constriction of the blockade was not of the dramatic character of Gettysburg or the battles of the Wilderness. Its meaning was to filter but slowly into even the more thoughtful. Thus for years, while immense changes were going on elsewhere, we were at a standstill in naval matters, or rather slowly sinking to absolute nonentity. By 1882 the shameful condition of neglect began to be remedied. That year may be taken as the birth-year of our navy of to-day. For seven years we had to go abroad for such material--gun-forgings, shafting, and armor--as we wanted, until our naval demands forced upon our steel establishments the work of putting themselves in order. The story of this work has never been told, but the country can be assured that it was to the navy that the initial great development of steel manufacture in this country was due. In 1882 we could make only a forged iron shaft for the little _Dolphin_, which promptly broke on her trial trip. It was through arrangements made by the Navy Department that our steel works, beginning with Bethlehem, established modern conditions. The story of the building of the new navy is outside the scope of this book. It suffices to say that by 1898 we had in service four battleships, the _Iowa_, _Indiana_, _Oregon_, and _Massachusetts_, of the first class; the _Texas_, of the second; two armored cruisers, the _New York_ and _Brooklyn_; eleven protected cruisers of from 3,000 to 7,735 tons, and twenty unprotected cruisers of from 839 to 2,089 tons. We also had eight torpedo boats, a dynamite vessel, the _Vesuvius_, and six ships of the monitor type, from 4,000 to 6,060 tons. It was with this fleet we fought the war with Spain. The causes of this war stretch back through generations. Their foundation was, essentially, a difference in race. The American is mainly an Anglo-Saxon, direct and practical in his way; the Spaniard an oriental, courteous, kindly in the relations of friendship and family, with much that is lovable, but impracticable, tribal in his tendencies, knowing little of the modern phases of government by a constitution, and bloodthirsty and devastating in putting down revolt or in settling political differences. An anarchic century in Spain produced like conditions in Cuba. Our proximity to Cuba and our many commercial interests there were very strong elements in the situation.