Chapter VI.

Among the inestimable legacies left to America by our countryman Fulton, was the invention of means for the submarine use of powder. That invention was of a highly philanthropic character. It aimed to place in the hands of maritime States, whose domestic institutions, as well as their integral wealth and prosperity, demanded a peaceful foreign policy, and forbade the maintenance of great navies or armies, a tremendous weapon which, such men as William Pitt and Chancellor Livingston believed, would, if perfected, almost alone suffice for the defence of their ports from the overwhelming squadrons of Britain. The strictly defensive nature of this mode of warfare suggests a sufficient answer to the deprecatory and opprobrious argument and invectives that have been adduced against and heaped upon it, of being an unmanly, uncivilized, unchivalrous, inhuman, wholesale, unfair, &c., means of destruction. Such arguments and tirades might however, be expected to be the resort of a power which, obliged by the geographical peculiarities of its central territory, and its situation in regard to other maritime States and to its colonial possessions, to maintain an immense fleet, has always used it not only to protect its own, but also as a means of aggression; and naturally must fear that its power would be vastly curtailed for offensive purposes, in case of the perfection and adoption by its maritime rivals, for the security of their harbors, of Fulton's terrible invention. Equally good arguments have been urged by Britain against recourse to privateering on our part in case of war between the two countries; and she would employ similar sophistries to procure the setting aside from the modes of warfare recognized among civilized nations of all except such as she is essentially superior in.

I do not know that any member of the military profession has as yet recommended or even treated of this method of resisting superior fleets. There would seem to be two reasons for this. Professional men are rarely the ones to invent, or the first to adopt or patronize an invention. The nature of their training disinclines them to novelty and change. Gunpowder was most reluctantly admitted into a place in military art. Its tendency to neutralize brute force was at first deemed its vilest feature. It was as offensive in the eyes of the armor-clad knight, who had been accustomed in battle to massacre ill-protected foot soldiers with comparative comfort to himself, as, no doubt, the submarine mine is to the British admiral, confident, in the strength and numbers of his ships, of victory over all opponents.

But who will assert at this time that fire-arms have been the cause of any depreciation of physical courage as an element in the military strength of a nation? And who can deny the civilizing and humanizing influence of that invention upon the world at large, as proved by the almost universal dominion exercised at this day by the intellectual races of the earth.

Another cause that has perhaps tended to prevent the adoption of submarine explosions into the legitimate resources of military art,

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