The _Constitution_ measured (Roosevelt’s account) 1,576 tons; the _Guerrière_, 1,338. The _Constitution_ could fire 27 guns in a broadside, throwing 684 pounds of metal (actual weight); the _Guerrière_, 25 guns, throwing 556 pounds of metal. The _Constitution_ carried 456 men; the _Guerrière_ but 272. The _Constitution_ lost, as already told, 7 killed and 7 wounded; while the _Guerrière_ lost 23 killed and 56 wounded--over one-fourth of her crew. The comparative force of the ships rated by these standards, was as 100 to 70; the comparative casualties were as 18 to 100. To this may be added that the relative injury to the ships was as 100 to nothing. Arguing from these figures the British writers say that the _Constitution_ was “a seventy-four-gun ship of the line in disguise.” “Why should not any American feel proud of that assertion?” For if it be so, the old Quaker ship-builder of Philadelphia was not only the greatest ship-builder in America, but in the whole world. When the British officers called her so they confessed that when they had called her “a bunch of pine boards” they were mistaken. They confessed that they had been utterly incapable of judging the fighting worth of the _Constitution_, although they had gone over her and examined her carefully. The British point to the fact that our most powerful projectiles came from twenty-four pounders, while theirs were from eighteens. Here again they confess their own inability to arm a ship. They had for twenty years been fighting the navies of Europe. Out of the experience there gained they had decided that the long eighteens were the best calibre for the main-deck battery of a frigate. The last frigates launched from British ship-yards previous to this battle were armed with long eighteens. The British officers who inspected the _Constitution_ from time to time before the war of 1812 ridiculed the idea of trying to fight with long twenty-fours. The long twenty-fours were “too heavy!” But when their best frigates had been defeated by the Yankees they began to weigh the projectiles and learned that their defeat was due to the much ridiculed twenty-fours. If the British had carried their investigations into the size of the shot a trifle further--to the mechanism of the guns, for instance--they would have learned something of real significance. They would have seen that the cannon of the _Constitution_ were _furnished with sights_. The _Guerrière_ lost her masts not by accident, but because _the cool Yankee gunners could aim their weapons accurately_.