That commerce, fostered by our accidental
position as neutrals when the two great commercial nations of the world
were at war, had reached a marvellous height. Its keels vexed every sea.
Its flag was now seen in the frozen circles; and now it reflected from
its waving folds the fervors of the southern cross. Our merchants,
springing, as it were, in a single night from the station of ordinary
dealers and dependents on foreign countries to that of arbiters and
rulers of the commerce of the globe, were equal to their new position;
and our sailors, responsive to their will, gathered with their Briarean
arms the wealth of every realm. Foreign statesmen in the recesses of the
cabinet, and economists in the closet, beheld with amazement the rapid
growth of our marine. They saw a nation, which had not then attained its
seventeenth year, enjoying a commerce which nearly equalled in tonnage
that which England had been gradually forming from the date of the
Norman Conquest to that hour--a period of near eight hundred years. At
such an epoch a strict neutrality in respect of the contending powers
was the dictate alike of duty and interest.
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