or nearly so, in every part, then of what avail is that strategy which secures choice of position, and which, of old, almost decided the battle?  Will not he come off victor who can produce guns from which the heaviest shot may be hurled at the highest velocity, and gunners who shall launch them on their errand of destruction with the greatest accuracy?  The French emperor has fairly overreached his island rivals.  While they were experimenting, he laid the keels of two iron-clads of six thousand tons burden.  In 1859 he ordered the construction of twenty steel-clad frigates and fifty gunboats.  Lord Clarence Paget declared in debate last March, that, while England had, finished or constructing, only sixteen iron-clad frigates, France had thirty-one.  And even this takes no account of floating-batteries and gunboats, wholly or in part protected, and of which, if we are to trust her papers, France has an almost fabulous number.

* * * * *

But who shall man this fleet?  Where are the skilful mariners to make efficient these tremendous elements of naval power?  It was Lord Nelson, I think, who exclaimed, when he saw the stanch ships of Spain, “Thank God, Spaniards cannot build men!” The recent changes in naval construction, decreasing perhaps the relative worth of mere seamanship, may have made the exclamation less pertinent than of old.  But, after all, on the rude and stormy ocean, proverbially fickle and uncertain, nothing can take the place of sailors,—­of brave and skilful men, trained by long struggle with wind and wave, calm in danger, apt in emergencies, finding the narrow path of safety where common eyes see only peril and ruin.  France understands tins.  She knows how many of her past humiliations can be traced directly to defective seamanship.  But where to seek the remedy?  How to find or make sailors fit to contend with those who were almost born and bred on the restless surge?  By what methods, with a slender commercial marine and a people reluctant to encounter the hardships and dangers of sea-life, to fill up the scanty roll of her able seamen?  That is the problem France had to solve; and she has done everything to solve it,—­but remove impossibilities.

The first counsel of wisdom was to make the number of her sailors greater.  France has, at the most liberal estimate, only one hundred and fifty thousand men at all conversant with the sea; while England has, including boatmen, fishermen, coasters, and sailors of long voyages, the enormous number of eight hundred thousand.  Remove this disproportion and you settle the whole question.  Unfortunately, this is a matter in which government can do but little, while national tastes and habits do everything.  No despotism can make a commercial marine where no commercial spirit is.  And no voice, charm it ever so wisely, can draw the peasant of France from his vine-clad hills and plains.  The French rulers have done what they could.  They have fostered, with a steady