Yet it had previously survived and triumphed over calamities far more severe.

The destruction wrought by Confederate cruisers was trifling compared with the work of the British and French privateers when the nation was very small and weak.
The American spirit had ceased to concern itself with the sea as the vital and dominant element.

The footsteps of the young men no longer turned toward the wharf and the waterside and the tiers of tall ships outward bound.

They were aspiring to conquer an inland empire of prairie and mountain and desert, impelled by the same pioneering and adventurous ardor which had burned in their seafaring sires.

Steam had vanquished sail--an epochal event in a thousand years of maritime history--but the nation did not care enough to accept this situation as a new challenge or to continue the ancient struggle for supremacy upon the sea.