Thus ended, practically, the extraordinary career of piracy and slavery which through so many generations had been submitted to by Europe. It was not, however, until 1824, when the demand for continuance of tribute from Holland was successfully resisted, that Algiers finally dismissed the idea of return to her ancient ways. It should be a proud memory to Americans that it was the American navy which first resisted and brought to terms the barbarous corsairs, so long the scourge of commerce and enslavers of white men. The Frenchman Dupuy, at the end of his admirable history of our Barbary wars, pays us a fine tribute, saying: “The statesmen [of America], breaking loose from the unworthy yielding of Europe to the Barbary States, had in hardly thirty years broken the abominable traditions which the Christian powers had shamefully respected for ages.”[25] CHAPTER XIV While we were fighting the Algerines, we were suffering from depredations on our commerce by France and England a hundredfold more serious than all we had undergone from the African corsairs. The story is as shameful to the statesmanship of the period as our stand with regard to Barbary was honorable. Napoleon dominated Europe by land; England by sea. The former’s great aim after subjecting the Continental states, rotten with the decaying feudalism of the past centuries, was to destroy English supremacy by closing all Europe to English commerce, an effort which was to fail through one of the greatest instincts of man, that of trade. Almost universal war thus made neutral America the great carrier; our shipping increased by amazing bounds and covered every sea. But between the two great antagonists it was to be heavily ground. Our losses were in many millions, our ships for a considerable period being seized at an average of three a day. It would take a book much larger than this to go into the details of this question which looms so large even to this day. Added to the question of ships was that of impressment of our seamen who were taken out of our merchantmen, and in two cases from men-of-war, to man those of the British navy, on the claim that a British subject was always a subject. In carrying out this dictum, a vast number of Americans were claimed as such from mere appearance or other characteristic or for no reason whatever except that he was a likely man. Over 11,000 were to be so taken before, in 1812, we went to war.