The naval history of the United States during the period since the Civil War has been not a little like that of the period following the War of the Revolution. When the Civil War was ended and the acute complication with our over-sea neighbors during 1865 was past, we sold off our ships as a merchant disposes of his shelf-worn goods. It is true we did not sell every ship as we did in 1785, but in 1885 we were relatively in as helpless a condition as, and actually in a more shameful condition than, we were when we had not a ship that belonged to the nation; for the wooden hulks on the naval list in 1885 and their smooth-bore Dahlgren shell guns were, for the purpose of carrying the flag in the face of an enemy having ironclads and rifles, absolutely useless. And as to the shame of it, we know that in 1785 the nation was poor, and even the few dollars needed to keep a frigate or two in commission seemed a large sum, while the nation in the later years, when the navy was neglected, was spending enough money in dredging out commerceless channels to have built squadrons of several times the needed force. It is the usual thing for writers who refer to that period to say, because we slipped through it without a more serious foreign complication than the murder of a few American citizens by the Spanish government at Santiago de Cuba, in 1873, it was really to our advantage that we built no ships. The European governments were experimenting at great cost, and we were saved all of that. We got the benefit of their experience and saved the dollars. But the fact is we could not and did not benefit by their experience to any degree worth serious consideration. Neither the individual man nor the aggregation of men called a nation can take advantage of the apprenticeship which another man or nation has served. I do not hope to have this statement believed by people to whom the only fruition of labor and life is a dollar. But there are some who understand that national character, like individual character, is of more importance than dollars; that the very chuckling over the dollars we saved “while other nations were experimenting for us” is contemptible; that, to take another and more material point of view, what we lost in the development of the brains of our mechanics and inventors by letting the other nations do the “experimenting for us” was of infinitely greater value than the whole revenue of the nation. It is not the loss of a product of ships that is to be deplored, but the loss of a product of men. [Illustration: The Old Method of Handling a Ship’s Bowsprit. _From an old engraving._]