Whatever else Algeria may or may not have done for France, it certainly has furnished a field whereon to train soldiers.  Here seventy-five thousand men, day and night, have watched and fought a wily foe.  Here all the great soldiers of the Empire, Arnand, Pelissier, Canrobert, Bosquet, have won their first laurels.  Here, amid the exigencies of wild desert and mountain campaigning, has grown up that marvellous body of soldiers, the Zouaves:  “picked men, short of stature, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, bull-necked,” agile as goats, tolerant of thirst and hunger, outmarching, outfighting, and outenduring the Desert Arab; men who have never turned their backs upon a foe.  Subtract from the army of Louis Napoleon the heroes of Algeria, and you leave behind a body out of which the fiery soul has fled.

The commercial results are not quite so satisfactory.  The exports, indeed, have risen to fifteen millions of dollars, and the imports to twenty-five millions more; while some two hundred thousand Europeans have made their home in the Colony, and a few hundred square miles have been subjected to European culture.  But as the yearly cost of the occupation is fifteen million of dollars, the net profit cannot be great.  Algeria, however, is the safety-valve of France, giving active employment to the idle, the discontented, and the revolutionary; and the Government, on that account, may consider that the money is well expended.

One consequence of the occupation of Algeria has generally been overlooked,—­its naval result.  Hitherto France had absolutely no good port in the Mediterranean (if we except those of Corsica) but Toulon and Marseilles.  It was absolutely less at home in its own sea than England.  The new conquest gave it a strip of coast on the southern border of the sea, but no port.  The harbor of Algiers, with the exception of a little haven artificially protected and capable of holding insecurely a dozen vessels, was much like that of Cherbourg, an open bay, facing northward.  The storms sweep it with such fury that not less than twenty vessels have been driven ashore in one gale.  But the French genius seems to delight in such struggles for empire with the waves.  Almost with the taking of the citadel the engineer began his work.  Two jetties, as they are called, were pushed out from the land into deep water,—­one from the mole on the north, half a mile long, and the other from Point Bab-Azoum on the south, a third of a mile long.  In 1850 these were so far complete as to inclose a safe harbor of two hundred acres.  But not content, the French have already planned, and possibly are now finished, still other works, by which the perilous roadstead outside this harbor shall be transformed into a secure anchorage of sixteen hundred acres.  Past events warrant us in believing that these improvements will be pursued with no slack hand, until astonished Europe finds another Cherbourg, a safe harbor, ample means of repair, and frowning guns to repel all invaders.  Imprudent Young France, indeed, whispers now that Algiers makes the Mediterranean a French lake.  But that is a little premature.  While Gibraltar and Malta hold safely their harbors, and England’s naval power is unbroken, no nation can truly make this boast.