He denied that fleets were necessary to protect commerce.

He challenged its friends to show, from the history of any nation in Europe as from our own, that commerce and the navy had gone hand in hand.

There was no nation except Great Britain, he said, whose navy had any connection with commerce.

Navies were instruments of power more calculated to annoy the trade of other nations than to protect that of the nations to which they belonged.

The price England had paid for her navy was a debt of three hundred millions of pounds sterling.