Yet Cherbourg is but one of five ports equally efficient, equally protected, and equally furnished with the products of mechanic and nautical invention.  Brest, L’Orient, and Rochefort, on the west, have far greater natural and scarcely less acquired advantages; while the old port of Toulon on the Mediterranean, old only in name, has been so enlarged and strengthened, that it can supply for the southern waters all and more than Cherbourg does for the northern.  One fact will show to what an extent this power of naval production has been carried.  In these five ports are some eighty building-slips or houses, and twenty-five docks, and, connected with them, all the materials, all the trades, all the labor-saving machines, all the mechanical forces, which the nineteenth century knows.  If she wished, France could build at the same time forty ships of the line and forty frigates, while twenty-five more were undergoing repairs.  The result of all this activity is, that, in extent, in completeness, in concentration of forces upon the right spot, the naval ports and dockyards of France are absolutely unequalled.  And the work goes on.  To-day twenty-two thousand men are employed upon naval works.  Within six months a wet dock has been completed at Toulon, and another at L’Orient, while at Brest great ranges of workshops are hastening to completion; and it is whispered that at Cherbourg another basin is, like its predecessors, to be chiselled out of the solid rock.

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Do we ask now what France has gained, in fleets and armaments, from this immense work of preparation?  Everything.  Not to dwell upon sailing-ships, which the progress of invention has made of inferior worth, she has a steam-navy second to that of no power in Europe.  Her present ruler has fully appreciated the importance of that new element in naval warfare, steam,—­an element all the more important to France, that it tends to lower the value of mere seamanship, in which she has always been deficient, and to increase the value of scientific knowledge and training, in which she has ever been with the foremost.  For ten years her energy has been tasked to produce steamships of the greatest power and of the finest models.  Since 1852 her ships of the line have increased from two to forty, and her frigates from twenty-one to forty-six.  A fleet has thus been created which is numerically equal to that of England, and which, so far as these things depend upon the stanchness of the ships and the weight of the armaments, is perhaps in force and efficiency superior.

If we turn our attention to iron-clad ships, we shall see best displayed the sagacity, energy, and secretiveness of Louis Napoleon.  In the Crimean War, three floating batteries covered with iron slabs, and each mounting eighteen fifty-pounders, silenced the Russian fort at Kinburn.  This was a lesson it would seem that any one might learn.  Louis Napoleon did not fail to learn it.  If a ship can be made invulnerable,