eem that any one might learn. Louis Napoleon
did not fail to learn it. If a ship can be made invulnerable, 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 hund