But the most important--rather the most pleasing of all the confessions in the British explanations after defeat is that relating to the superior numbers of the American crews. The count showed 456 individuals on the _Constitution_, and 272 on the _Guerrière_. To contend, as the British writers do contend, that the “superiority on the American side “was” in number of men as--nine to five,” is to admit that man for man, an American naval seaman, in spite of his lack of experience, was the equal of the tar-stained, cicatrice-marked British seaman; and that was a confession which Americans in those days (not now) were most anxious to extort. But the British writers did not stop at this confession. They went further and admitted all the most boastful Yankee could have wished. They said (_vide_ the British _Naval Chronicle_), that “the few on board an American ship-of-war that are designated as _boys_ are as old and stout as most men employed in our service.” And the last of all is the confession of the same periodical that “had the _Guerrière’s_ men been half as well skilled in the use of great guns as the _Constitution’s_ were, the proportion of killed and wounded would not have been so great nor one ship made a complete wreck of while the other suffered no material injury in hull or rigging.” Isaac did so maul and rake her That the decks of Captain Dacre Were in such a woful pickle As if Death, with scythe and sickle, With his sling or with his shaft Had cut his harvest fore and aft. Thus, in thirty minutes, ended Mischiefs that could not be mended; Masts and yards and ship descended All to David Jones’s locker---- Such a ship, in such a pucker! So sang the old-time Yankee rhymester of the ship that “was not the _Little Belt_.” The British Admiralty boards eventually threw aside their prejudices, and adopted long twenty-fours with sights on them in place of unsighted long eighteens. They have done even more than that, for when in these last years the swift armored cruiser _New York_, with her eight-inch rifles in turrets, was added to the American navy, giving us the most powerful cruiser in the world, they at once laid down four armored cruisers that were larger in displacement and carried more powerful engines, thicker turrets, and a more powerful armament than the _New York_.