fleets, officers and men alike are schooled in all branches of nautical duty.  In port or out of it, they are not idle.  Every day a prescribed routine of exercise is rigidly enforced.  Great have been the results.  The French sailor of 1863 is not a reproduction of the sailor of 1800.  In alertness, in knowledge, in silent obedience, he is a great improvement upon his predecessor.  Actual experiment shows that a French crew will weigh anchor, spread and furl sail, replace spars or running-ringing, lower or raise topmasts, or perform any other duty pertaining to a ship, with as much celerity as the crew of any other nation.  And no confusion, no babbling of many voices, such as the British writers of the last generations delighted to describe, mars the beauty of the evolutions.  One mind directs, and one voice alone breaks the stillness.  Since the Crimean War, the English speak with respect of French seamanship; and though they do not believe that it is equal to their own, they do not scruple to allow that a naval battle would be disputed now with a fierceness hitherto unknown.

All that sagacity and experience would prompt has been attempted.  All that training and discipline can do has already been accomplished.  Yet there is one source of weakness for which there can be no remedy.  France has no naval reserves.  And if she war with England, she will need them.  To put her marine on a war-basis would require all her available seamen.  To fill the gaps of war, she has not, and she cannot have, until a truly commercial spirit grows up in the hearts of her people, the multitudes of reserved men, more familiar with the sea than the land, such as swarm in English ports.  Yet, with every deduction, her capacity of naval production, her strong fleets, and her trained seamen make her a naval power whose might no one can estimate, and whose assault any nation may well shun by all means except the sacrifice of honor and rights.

* * * * *

If now we turn from the naval progress of France to her recent colonial enterprises, we shall find fresh evidence that she has resumed that contest which came to so disastrous a close fifty years ago.  The old dream of colonial empire has come back again.  This was inevitable.  A great nation like France cannot always drink the cup of humiliation.  With an ambition no less high and arrogant than that which pervades the British mind, she would plant far and wide French ideas and civilization.  While England has colonies scattered in every part of the habitable globe, while Holland has almost monopolized the rich islands of the Eastern Archipelago, and while even Spain has Manila in the East and Cuba in the West, it could hardly be expected that France, the equal of either, and in some respects the superior of all, should rest content with a virtual exclusion from everything but her narrow home-possessions.