It is remarkable that the use of the navy, as a great branch of the military power of England, had been scarcely contemplated until the last century. Though the sea-coast of England, the largest of any European state, and the national habits of an insular country, might have pointed out this direction for the national energies from the earliest period, yet England was a kingdom for five hundred years before she seems to have thought of the use of ships as an instrument of public power. In the long war with France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ships were almost wholly mercantile; and, when employed in wars, were chiefly employed as transports to throw our troops on the French soil. It was the reign of Elizabeth, that true birth of the progress of England, that first developed the powers of an armed navy. The Spanish invasion forced the country to meet the Armada by means like its own; and the triumph, though won by a higher agency, and due to the winds and waves, or rather to the Supreme Providence which watched over the land of Protestantism, awoke the nation to the true faculty of defence; and from that period alone could the burden of the fine national song be realized, and Britain was to "rule the main." The expeditions against the Spanish West Indies, and the new ardour of discovery in regions where brilliant fable lent its aid to rational curiosity, carried on the process of naval power. The war against Holland, under Charles II., though disastrous and impolitic, showed at least that the fleet of England was the true arm of its strength; and the humiliation of the only rival of her commerce at once taught her where the sinews of war lay, and by what means the foundations of naval empire were to be laid. But it was not until the close of the last century that the truth came before the nation in its full form. The American war--a war of skirmishes--had its direct effect, perhaps its providential purpose, in compelling England to prepare for the tremendous collision which was so soon to follow, and which was to be the final security of the Continent itself. It was then, for the first time, that the nation was driven to the use of a navy on a great scale. The war, lying on the western shore of an ocean, made the use of naval armaments necessary to every operation. The treacherous hostility of the French cabinet, and the unfortunate subserviency of Spain to that treachery, made corresponding energy on the part of England a matter of public demand; and when France and Spain sent out fleets of a magnitude till then unknown, England was urged to follow their example. The defeats of the combined navies excited the nation to still more vigorous efforts; and the war closed with so full a demonstration of the matchless importance of a great navy to England, that the public feeling was fixed on giving it the largest contribution of the national confidence.