England Plundered American Commerce in Our Civil War.—From Benson J.Lossing’s “History of the Civil War:” “The Confederates ... with the aid of the British aristocracy, shipbuilders and merchants, and the tacit consent of the British government, were enabled to keep afloat on the ocean some active vessels for plundering American commerce. The most formidable of the Anglo-Confederate plunderers of the sea was the ‘Alabama,’ which was built, armed, manned and victualled in England. She sailed under the British flag and was received with favor in every British port that she entered. In the last three months of the year 1862 she destroyed by fire twenty-eight helpless American merchant vessels. While these incendiary fires, kindled by Englishmen, commanded by a Confederate leader, were illuminating the bosom of the Atlantic Ocean, a merchant ship (the “George Griswold”) laden with provisions as a gift for the starving English operatives in Lancashire, who had been deprived of work and food by the Civil War in America, and whose necessities their own government failed to relieve, was sent from the City of New York, convoyed by a national war vessel, to save her from the fury of the British sea-rover!”

Recent statistics show that while 90% of our imports and 89% of our exports were carried in American bottoms before the Civil War, they had declined to 10and 7½% of our imports and exports in1910.