But we have only to look at her acts to know what England is thinking.  For six years she has been engaged in an unceasing war with France,—­not, indeed, with swords and bayonets, but as really with her workshops and dockyards.  She has tasked these to their uttermost to maintain and increase her naval superiority.  And this is not the only evidence we have of her true feeling.  The building of new fortifications for her ports, and the enlargement and strengthening of the old defences, all tell the same story of profound distrust.  “Plymouth has been made secure.  The mouth of the Thames is thought to be impregnable.”  That is the way English papers write.  Around Portsmouth and Gosport she has thrown an immense girdle of forts.  We may think what we will of Cherbourg, England views it in the light of a perpetual menace.  To the proud challenge she has sent back a sturdy defiance.  Right opposite to it, on her nearest shore, she has reared a “Gibraltar of the Channel.”  If you take your map, you will perceive, facing Cherbourg, and projecting from the southern coast of England, the little island of Portland, which at low tide becomes a peninsula, and is connected with the main land by Chesil Bank, a low ridge of shingle ten miles long.  On the extreme north of this island, looking down into Weymouth Bay, is a little cluster of rocky hills, rising sharply to a considerable height, and occupying, perhaps, a space of sixty acres.  This is where the fortress, or Veme, as it is called, is built.  On the northern side, the cliff lifts itself up from the waters of the bay almost in a perpendicular line, and is absolutely inaccessible.  On all other sides the Veme has been isolated by a tremendous chasm, which makes the dry ditch of the fort.  This chasm has been blasted into the solid rock, and is nowhere less than a hundred feet wide and eighty feet deep.  At the angles of the fortress it widens to two hundred feet, and sinks beneath the batteries in a sheer perpendicular of one hundred and thirty feet.  Two bastions jut from the main work into it, protecting it from approach by a terrible cross-fire.  All the appointments are upon the same scale.  The magazines, the storehouses, the water-tanks, are built to furnish supplies for a siege, not of months, but of years.  On every side the rocky surface of the hills has been shaved down below the level of its guns; so that there is not a spot seaward or landward that may not be swept by its tremendous batteries.  Such is this remarkable stronghold which is rising to completion opposite Cherbourg.  Yet it is but one of several strong forts which are to protect the single harbor of Weymouth Bay.  Was this Titanic work reared in the spirit of trust?  Does it speak of England’s hope of abiding friendship with France?  No; it tells us that beneath seeming amity a deadly struggle is going on,—­that every dock hollowed, every ship launched, every colony seized, and every fortress reared, is but another step in a silent, but real, contest for supremacy.