than a kind of warfare which should drown women and children
because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.

Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it
was a game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and
the temptation is to extol their audacious achievements while
glossing over the heavy losses which their own merchant marine
suffered. The weakness of privateering was that it was wholly
offensive and could not, like a strong navy, protect its own
commerce from depredation. While the Americans were capturing
over seven hundred British vessels during the first two years of
the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were taken or
sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept the
Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes
these vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average
amount of two thousand pounds each and the loss to the American
owners was, of course, ever so much larger.

The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of
history to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy,
with blockading squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged
armies on land which retreated oftener than they fought, private
armed ships dealt the maritime prestige of Great Britain a far
deadlier blow than the Dutch, French, and Spanish were able to
inflict. In England, there resulted actual distress, even lack of
food, because these intrepid seamen could not be driven away from
her own coasts and continued to snatch their prizes from under
the guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of the West
India Colonies was even worse, as witness this letter from a
merchant of Grenada: "We are happy if we can get anything for