Mr. Hans Busk, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, was moved to write on page 104, in his “Navies of the World,” that “the navy of the United States has a tolerably imposing appearance upon paper,” but he concludes that a British frigate of the _Diadem_ class, “avowedly built to cope with those of the description of the _Merrimac_, etc., would speedily capture her great ungainly enemy.” To fully appreciate this remarkable statement it must be known that the _Diadem_ could fire at a broadside ten ten-inch shells, weighing in the aggregate 820 pounds, five thirty-two-pound solid shot, and two sixty-eight-pound solid shot--in all 1,116 pounds of shot to 1,424 pounds that the _Merrimac’s_ broadside weighed. The frigate _Minnesota_ carried, soon after the Civil War broke out, no less than forty-two nine-inch Dahlgrens, one of eleven inches, four 100-pounder rifles, and one 150-pounder rifle. She could throw 1,861 pounds of metal at a broadside. Moreover, it was not a mere matter of weight of metal. The diameter of the American projectiles was a matter for serious consideration by the enemy, and so was the ability of the gun to stand service. The best English gun could stand a charge of twelve pounds of powder, and the best American fifteen. There was a vast difference in the smashing effect of an eleven-inch shell driven by fifteen pounds of powder and a ten-inch shell driven by twelve. All this seems worth telling only because it shows that the ideas of armament which prevailed among the English and the Americans before the War of 1812 were still held by the two nations in 1859. Indeed, the disproportion between the _Minnesota’s_ armament and that of the _Diadem_ was very much greater than that between the _United States_ and the _Macedonian_. In short, all things considered, the American people had just the fleet they needed for that day to resist foreign aggression.