Page 168 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

American Naval Power. 149

ever short, for political influence they must be
traversed in the last resort by a navy, the in-
dispensable instrument by which, when emer-
gencies arise, the nation can project its power
beyond its own shore-line.
Whatever seeming justification, therefore,
there may have been in the transient conditions
of his own day for Jefferson's dictum concern-
ing a navy, rested upon a state of things that
no longer obtains, and even then soon passed
away. The War of 18:2 demonstrated the use-
fulness of a navy, — not, indeed, by the admir-
able but utterly unavailing single-ship victories
that illustrated its course, but by the prostration
into which our seaboard and external commu-
nications fell, through the lack of a navy at all
proportionate to the country's needs and expo-
sure. The navy doubtless reaped honor in that
brilliant sea struggle, but the honor was its own
alone only discredit accrued to the statesmen
;
who, with such men to serve them, none the
less left the country open to the humiliation
of its harried coasts and blasted commerce.
Never was there a more lustrous example of
what Jomini calls " the sterile glory of fighting
battles merely to win them." Except for the