The _Constellation_, of which this is a photograph, is somewhat smaller than the _Constitution_, being rated at 38 guns as against 44 for the latter. In general appearance, however, and particularly in rig, the two types are very similar. Although the Constellation did not herself see action in the War of 1812, she is a good example of the heavily armed American frigate of that day--and the only one of them still to be seen at sea under sail within recent years. At the present time the _Constellation_ lies moored at the pier of the Naval Training Station, Newport, R. I. Photograph by E. Mueller, Jr., Inc., New York. JACOB BROWN Painting by J. W. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the Corporation. THOMAS MACDONOUGH Painting by J. W. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the Corporation. CHAPTER I "ON TO CANADA!" The American people of today, weighed in the balances of the greatest armed conflict of all time and found not wanting, can afford to survey, in a spirit of candid scrutiny and without reviving an ancient grudge, that turbulent episode in the welding of their nation which is called the War of 1812. In spite of defeats and disappointments this war was, in the large, enduring sense, a victory. It was in this renewed defiance of England that the dream of the founders of the Republic and the ideals of the embattled farmers of Bunker Hill and Saratoga achieved their goal. Henceforth the world was to respect these States, not as so many colonies bitterly wrangling among themselves, but as a sovereign and independent nation. The War of 1812, like the American Revolution, was a valiant contest for survival on the part of the spirit of freedom. It was essentially akin to the world-wide struggle of a century later, when sons of the old foemen of 1812--sons of the painted Indians and of the Kentucky pioneers in fringed buckskins, sons of the New Hampshire ploughboys clad in homespun, sons of the Canadian militia and the red-coated regulars of the British line, sons of the tarry seamen of the _Constitution_ and the _Guerriere_--stood side by side as brothers in arms to save from brutal obliteration the same spirit of freedom. And so it is that in Flanders fields today the poppies blow above the graves of the sons of the men who fought each other a century ago in the Michigan wilderness and at Lundy's Lane.