“I will not stop here to point out in detail the tremendous political and diplomatic advantage which England would enjoy when dealing with other maritime powers, if she could have always at hand an asylum for the lame ducks of her commercial fleet in time of war. Her ocean greyhounds, that could either escape the enemy’s cruisers or be readily converted into cruisers themselves, might remain under her flag; but all her slow freighters, tramps, and obsolete passenger boats of past eras would be transferred by sham sales to our flag, under which they could pursue their traffic in safety during the war under peace rates of insurance, and without any material diversion of their earnings, which would of course be increased by war freight rates, returning to their former allegiance at the end of the war. The lack of such an asylum amounts to a perpetual bond to keep the peace. “From the end of the Civil War to about 1880 there was but feeble effort to revive ship-building in this country. All our energies of capital and enterprise, as I have remarked elsewhere, were directed to the extension of railways in every direction, to the repair of the war ravages in the South, to the settlement of the vast territories of the West,—in a word, to purely domestic development, pending which England was by common consent left to enjoy her ocean monopoly. “Such was the state of affairs in 1883-85, when the adoption of the policy of naval reconstruction offered to American ship-building the first encouragement it had seen in a quarter of a century. “When we began to build the new navy, every English journal, from the _London Times_ down, pooh-poohed the idea that a modern man-of-war could be built in an American yard, modern high-powered engines in an American machine-shop, or modern breech-loading cannon in an American forge. Many of the English ship-builders rubbed their hands in actual anticipation of orders from this government for the ships and guns needed; and they blandly assured us that they would give us quite as favorable terms as were accorded to China, Japan, and Chile. And, to their shame be it said, there were officers of our navy who not only adopted this view, but did all they could to commit our government to the pernicious policy.