ART. III.-THE NAVY AND ITS USE.

REDUCTION OF THE NAVY-ITS INFLUENCE ON OUR COMMERCE-USE OF THE NAVY-PROGRESS OF THE NAVY-PROBABILITY OF A GENERAL WAR-THE RIGHT OF SEARCHINFLUENCE OF THE NAVY ABROAD THE NAVY SHOULD BE INCREASED, ETC.

THE Contemplated reduction of the navy is the measure of which of all others the present Congress can claim the most undisputed parentage. Coming even from a body as eccentric as that with which it originated, we confess it struck us with grave astonishment. In a time of superficial peace, when our relations with the great maritime powers of the old world have become so entangled as to make quite probable the intervention of that summary diplomacy which the strong is always ready to wreak upon the weak; when we are just plunging into the embarrassments which will arise from the winding up of an old tariff and the adjustment of another, which, from the necessities of the general government, must be more spread, and, from the pressure of local interests, may be more unequal than that which preceded it; at a time when the propriety which is thus created of a respectable central force, is increased by the urgent requisition on the general government for interposition by the constituted authorities of at least one state;-at such a time, we repeat, we did not anticipate that a proposition to reduce and to incapacitate the navy, would be seriously debated in our national legislature. Such however has been the case. Without the least pulse of instigation from the body of the people, without the preparatory internal motions by which great measures are preceded, without the reception of evidence or the hearing of counsel, either before the House or by committee, votes were taken and resolutions passed, which would eventuate, if carried into effect, in the prostration of our maritime service. It is not our duty to speculate upon the results of the various reforms which were thus passed upon, or to criticise the modifications of which they were susceptible. We make use of the opportunity which the movement itself affords, to claim a hearing on behalf of those whose property and whose character have been put at stake. As the organ of the commercial community, we have a right to come into court

and show reason why the navy should not go down. We are parties in

terested in the cause, and we are privileged to be heard, not only because our right as citizens gives us a right as judges, but because it is upon us that the blow will finally fall; because when the rampart which protects our wealth and our immunities is removed, the city which is behind it will be pillaged.

We do not argue the question of the expediency of great commercial dealings. No legislation can stop them; and though they may be greatly disarranged, and cruelly distorted by domestic interference or by foreign aggression, though our integral wealth may be dissipated, and our national honor laid low by governmental interposition, as long as we have more than we want of some of the great staples of consumption, and have less than we want of others; as long as fields plaided with tobacco, and swamps bristled with rice, and brakes plumed with the cotton plant, are swathed over the body of the southern states; as long as the north can produce coarse grains, and rough cloths, and common cutlery, sufficient to supply the southern market, so long will the wheel of trade be kept in motion, and the north and south together will exchange their natural productions

for others which in England or in India can be raised more cheaply. The merchant may be reduced to a savage, but he still will barter the rude superfluities which then remain to him, for the necessities of which the next savage is possessed. As a nation, we form part of the great harmonious system of the universe, and should we be cut out from the surrounding members, should we be separated from the market place, where our common wants and our common superfluities can be exchanged, we will find, like a man who has on a dozen jackets while otherwise he is wholly naked, that while the necessities which we possess are so redundant as to be oppressive, they can only by an entire contortion of their office be made to supply the articles of which we are in want. Such a state of things could scarcely exist, except in an interregnum of revolution. The man doubly clothed in one quarter, who meets a neighbor doubly clothed in another, will soon adjust an equilibrium of necessities. We will trade with another, we will trade with foreign nations; and the question to be decided, is not whether we shall cease trading altogether, but whether our traders shall be preserved from insult, our property from confiscation, and our honor from disgrace.

Should the exports and imports of the country be measured by the cargo of a single ship, that ship should be protected by an adequate navy. A citizen of the United States has the same claim on the watchfulness of his government, whether he be in the Indian Sea or in the District of Columbia; and that same justice which must avenge his injuries, must prevent their future occurrence. The cabin of each armed cruiser becomes the consular office of the nation by whom it is despatched; and wherever the flag is suspended, a signal is held out, that from it protection may be sought and redress afforded. Wo to the dignity of a country whose citizens must rely, the moment the portcullis of their own forts is closed on them, upon the forbearance of rival nations for support. There was once a parenthesis of time, which the retrenchment lecturers have studiously dropped from our history, when, without any thing more than the masqueraded miniature of a navy, we were called upon to protect our commerce against the encroachments of the two great antagonist powers of the old world. In the centre of our fight lay our little gun-boats, exposed to the double fire of the huge three-deckers, which the mammoth energies of France and England had thrown upon the sea. An American merchant vessel was the legitimate prize on which the cruisers of both countries wreaked their prowess; and often, when a more noble robber was out of view, when the lion and the eagle of the forest were tearing each other in the distant landscape, privateers of the lowest grade of creation, who had prowled like jackals over the quarry, till the coast was clear, pounced down upon the victim, and carried it off in muffled swiftness to the cave where their treasures were secreted. There was none so mean as to do us honor. Our commerce was degenerating into a contraband carrying trade, and had not gun-boats sunk, had not the pride and honor of the country been roused to a pitch which repelled the encroachments of both aggressors, our merchant service would have been limited to an outlaw trade, and our navy would have been totally extinguished.

Our commercial history, since that era, need not be written. Not in one point alone, but in every section of the sphere, in every sea, where stout timbers, and stout hands, and stout hearts can carry the merchant, bargains have been struck and treaties cemented. The smallest trader,

the ice-retailer in India, or the toy-pedler in New Zealand, has pointed to his ship certificates as a diploma, whose potency no college, however savage, can resist. There has been a conventional sanctity attached to the American name in distant seas, which its gallant navy alone has won. What else there is to recommend us, we know not; our government is distasteful to the monarchies of the east, our financial dealings have not been the most creditable, nor our embassies the most splendid, and yet we have earned in the most desolate coasts a character which has conse. crated our commerce and secured our citizens. There are captains in the service who can testify of receptions the most solemn in courts the most wild, and of courtesies which spoke both of the respect and the kindness of the giver, from sovereigns of every grade from the cannibal monarch of the South Sea, to the deified Lady Hester Stanhope. Even in South America itself, the paradise of outlawry, in a country whose people are a creole compound of Spanish pride with Indian treachery, our flag has been unfurled to canonize with its shadow not only our domestic property, but the remnants of their own shattered constitution.

A

All this, are we told, is to be undone. The sentinels are to be withdrawn from the fortress. Our national ships are to be tossed out into the Gulf-stream, with their masts unclothed and their ports dismantled. navy which, in the hands of any other power, would be scarcely elastic enough to stretch over the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, is to be shorn of its growth and drifted loose on the world. It has done great service, but its claims to our gratitude are to be overlooked. Its officers have threefourths expatriated themselves, and as a reward, the fragment of home which they still clutch is to be torn from their hands. The moderate allowance given to them-an allowance which on shore to men of their energy and their self-sacrifice would be doubled by either of the remaining professions-is to be shrunk till it can but half cover their backs. Away from the national councils, scattered by the terms of their commissions to the four winds, their incomes, their services, their claims have been brought on the carpet, and without mercy criticised and dissected. They have been indicted by the grand inquest of the people, and before the people themselves they do now stand on trial.

We do not come forward to plead their cause. We are sure that with the great mass of the people it will require no labored defence. We feel, however, that we have a duty belonging to ourselves which it would be suicidal in us to neglect. It is our interests that are at stake, and through us the interests of the whole community. Disperse the police, and the seas will be the high road of piracy. Call home the navy, and the merchant service will be unsettled and destroyed. Let our guns cease to be heard, and our name will cease to be respected. Men should reflect on the vast general consequences which will result from a momentary withdrawal of our maritime force, and we are sure that the pruning hook will be thrown aside. We bring to mind that it is through a defended commerce that the infinite division of labor in our country is maintained, and that instead of the great mass being huddled together in one huge field, or in one huge workshop, to produce the cardinal indigenous articles of consumption on which life may be barely supported, each laborer is apportioned to his own branch and to his own individual employment, and is enabled, through the multifarious exchange that the reciprocity of trade has established, to devote himself to the vocation which his choice pre

scribed, be it even so narrow as the forging of pin-heads alone, and to receive in return for the exuberance of his own staple the luxuries and comforts which the most distant climates afford. We bring to mind that it is by the commutation of individual or of national productions that the blessings of civilization are created, and that it is by means of the possession of a decent competency by each man who is willing to work, that our free institutions are made practicable. We bring to mind, also, that when our commerce is no longer protected our national charity must cease, for it is by means of our commercial intercourse with distant nations alone, that we can hope to impress upon them the stamp of constitutional liberty and of Christian truth.

The necessity of an increase of the navy proportional to the increase of our foreign commerce, has been felt and acted on with remarkable uniformity since the period when the navy was first called into action. We have prepared a table which exhibits the amount of our exports from 1817 to 1840 inclusive, together with the navy expenses for the same period, by which it will be found that drawing off from the aggregates the flush caused by temporary gluts of the money market or by extraordinary and specific appropriations, there has been a sober and proportionable increase in each department.

Value of Exports

Expenses of the Navy.

To the present year belongs the distinction of having become the era in

which the navy

of the country should pass its culmination. The principle

(1) Increased to suppress piracies in the West Indies.

(2) Increased to suppress piracies. (3) Dry-docks begun.

(4) Exploring expedition preparing, and revenue expanding much.

(5) One large steamer. (6) Two more large steamers.

has been laid down authoritatively that naval appropriations must hereafter be squared within certain columns, and regulated by certain laws, no matter what may be the emergency of our foreign affairs or the necessities of our commerce. We should think that a principle quite the contrary would be the wisest. What will be the condition of our commerce when the fear is removed which is created on hostile or barbarous nations by the presence of our armed cruisers? If our trade is to extend, the garrison we place round it should extend also, and no surer way could be found of maiming our resources or of destroying our wealth, than by casting them out without protection on the high seas. We have no right, with a commerce every day increasing, with a country admirably adapted to commercial pursuits, to withdraw that watchfulness under the guarantee of which our trade was instituted. Our navy should not only not be reduced, but it should be extended in the proportion which has already existed. We claim that the expansion of our commerce should be met by a corresponding expansion of our maritime force. Had our own individual welfare been solely at stake, we would be justified in demanding as a right that protection which is necessary to our existence. We form part of a great community whose comfort, whose freedom, whose reputation, are intimately reticulated with our own, and when we are prostrated, the fibres of the whole body politic will be shattered. But we do not rest the cause here alone. Do our relations with foreign powers, we ask in the second place, justify the reduction of our naval service? We propose to glance hastily at the position in which we stand to one nation alone in the old world, and dropping all others from consideration, examine how far in connection with that power, we can be called upon to maim the most effective arm of our national defence.

It is not necessary to enter upon the question of a general war. Into the maelstrom of European politics may we never be drawn, but there may soon be felt a vast centripetal influence to which we must either submit ignominiously or resist by force. The old partition walls of nations are crumbling down and fresh landmarks starting up which will mark out in their time new and uncalculated combinations. How long will France, with a huge population whose taste is war, whose habit is war, whose glory is war, which has no commercial entanglements, no manufacturing manacles, which considers all peace on the basis of the two Parisian treaties dishonorable, which hates and despises the English as the Indian hates the white man, which thirsts and hungers for some new revolutionary whirlpool from which its eagles, darting down from their ancient fastnesses, may drag out their prey from the foaming surge,— how long will France remain cribbed and galled, with her circulation impeded, her spirit chafed, and her glory mildewed, when at a plunge she can toss over those fictitious limits into which the Congress of Vienna forced her? The Rhine and the Pyrenees, and then the Baltic and the Adriatic-away to those grand perpetual boundaries which nature has described! Once more let the dictator plant his horse on the summit of the Alps, once more let his sword point to Moscow or the Pyramids, and again those granite sentinels of buried ages will challenge from their ancient watch-seats troops of Frankish warriors, or again the skeletons of the barbarian Czars will be startled by invading armies in their vaulted mausoleum. The German Confederacy is knitting together its strength in preparation for such an outbreak. The Austrian empire is drilling its