Even today, after the lapse of but a year, it has become difficult, if not impossible, to realize the state of public feeling in Boston on that wet, raw day in April, 1898, when the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, then a militia regiment, marched solidly and grimly through the muddy streets on its way to Fort Warren. The sight of the long, blue column—officers on foot, men in heavy marching order—told more plainly than any telegraphic despatch that the long-expected war had come at last. Day by day the feeling of uneasiness in the cities and towns along the New England coast had been growing in intensity. Bombardment insurance was being written, securities and valuables were being removed from the safe-deposit vaults of shore cities to those of inland towns, while letters by the hundred, and delegations by the score were coming to the governors of coast States, praying for protection against naval raids. As in 1812, and as again in 1861, the authorities at Washington were overwhelmed with petitions for the naval protection of local interests, and—even as in former wars—they were compelled to reply that the few ships of war on the navy list could not be spared to do the work of shore batteries. The entire fleet of battleships, modern monitors, and cruisers barely sufficed for the composition of Dewey's squadron in the far East, of Sampson's and Schley's in the West Indies. Nor was this wide-spread feeling of alarm entirely without foundation, or due to unreasoning fear. More than one foreign service journal had reckoned the opposing fleets as nearly of equal strength, and even our own Captain Mahan now writes: "The force of the Spanish navy on paper, as the expression goes, was so nearly equal to our own, that it was well within the limits of possibility that an unlucky incident, the loss, for example, of a battleship, might make the Spaniard superior in nominal, or even in actual, available force. Where so much is at stake as the result of a war, or even the unnecessary prolongation of war, with its sufferings and anxieties, the only safe rule is to regard the apparent as the actual, until its reality has been tested." We are looking backward now; then we were looking forward. We now know, through the supreme tests of May 1st and July 3d, that the paper strength and the fighting strength of the Spanish navy were two widely differing qualities; but late in April, 1898, all this yet remained to be determined, and the memorable rush of the _Oregon_ from the far Pacific bears witness that the Navy Department recognized the preponderance that might be given by the addition of even a single fighting-ship to our force on the threatened Atlantic sea-board.