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PRIVATEERS.
15

a secondary question. It is unwise, I think, to make arrangements beforehand on this subject with foreign nations. Keep all your arms stored in your national arsenal. Don't part with any of them. If it is unnecessary or inexpedient in any particular war according to the circumstances of that war, to employ a particular weapon, let it remain stored up until the necessity or expediency for using it arises. The day might come when some disaster to our regular military marine might endanger our very existence, and then it might become expedient and highly necessary to call into activity every privateer which the wealth of our private enterprise and the daring of our seafaring population could place at the disposal of the Crown. To limit or control or trammel that reserve power by convention or treaty with foreign nations seems to me unwise and impolitic; and when I remember that the Spanish Armada was defeated and England saved by a fleet