With such a large extent of ocean and lake coast, and so vast and unprotected western and southern frontiers occupied by hostile savages, our troops were necessarily distributed over a wide surface. The northern army alone acted on the offensive--in all other sections of the country the Republic strove only to preserve its territory intact. The summer in which Dearborn's army lay inactive at Fort George, looked gloomy for the nation. Great exertions were being made to retrieve our errors, and the war in the north was carried on at an enormous expense. The conveying of provisions and arms for such a distance on pack-horses, increased immensely the price of every article. It was said that each cannon, by the time it reached Sackett's Harbor, cost a thousand dollars, while the transportation of provisions to the army of Harrison swelled them to such an exorbitant price, that the amount expended on a small detachment would now feed a whole army. The cost of building the indifferent vessels we had on Lake Ontario, was nearly two millions of dollars. But while these vast expenditures were made for the northern army, and Harrison was gradually concentrating his troops at Fort Meigs, and Perry building his little fleet on Lake Erie, soon to send up a shout that should shake the land, and while the murmuring of the savage hordes, that stretched from Mackinaw to the Gulf of Mexico, foretold a bloody day approaching, an ominous cloud was gathering over the Atlantic sea-coast. English fleets were hovering around our harbors and threatening our cities and towns with conflagration. The year before, England could spare but few vessels or troops to carry on the war. Absorbed in the vast designs of Napoleon, who having wrested from her nearly all her allies and banded them together under his standard--Austria, Prussia, Poland, all Germany pressing after his victorious eagles as they flashed above the waters of the Niemen--was at that time advancing with a half million of men on the great northern power. If he should prove successful, England would be compelled to succumb, or with a still more overwhelming force he would next precipitate himself upon her shores. But the snow-drifts of Russia had closed over that vast and gallant host--his allies had abandoned him, and the rising of the nations around him, in his weak, exhausted condition, foretold the overthrow that soon sent him forth an exile from his throne and kingdom. Released from the anxiety that had hitherto rendered her comparatively indifferent to the war on this continent, she resolved to mete out to us a chastisement the more severe since it had been so long withheld. Irritated, too, because we had endeavored to rob her of her provinces at a moment when she was the least able to extend protection to them, she did not regard us as a common enemy, but as one who by his conduct had ceased to merit the treatment accorded in civilized warfare. The first squadron appeared