bear witness to it. But no one can study him in
the light of the past and not see that his is no ordinary ambition. To
be the ruler of one kingdom does not fill out its measure. To be the
arbiter of the fortunes of states, the genius who shall change the
current of affairs and shape the destiny of the future,--to exercise a
power in every part of the globe, and to have a name familiar in every
land and beneath every sun,--this is his ambition. No wonder that under
such a ruler France has embarked in a career of colonial aggrandizement
whose limit no one can foresee. The same hand which curbed the despot of
the North, and made the fair vision of Italian unity a solid reality,
may well think to place a puppet king on the throne of the Aztecs, or to
carve rich provinces out of Farther India.

* * * * *

France made her first practical essay in colonization by her conquest of
Algiers. A Dey once said to an English consul, "The Algerines are a
company of rogues, and I am their captain." The definition cannot be
improved. That such a power should have been permitted to exist and
ravage is one of the anomalies of modern history. Yet within the memory
of living men this hoard of pirates flaunted its barbarism in the face
of the civilization of the nineteenth century. But in 1830 the Dey
filled the cup of wrath to the brim. He inflicted upon the French
consul, in full levee, the gross insult of a blow in the face. The
expedition sent to revenge the insult showed upon what a hollow
foundation this savage power rested. The army landed without opposition.
In five days it swept before it in hopeless rout the wreck of the
Algerine forces. In three weeks it breached and captured the corsair's
strongholds. The history of the French occupation of Algeria is a tale
of unceasing martial exploits, by which France has extended her empire
six hundred miles along the shores of the Mediterranean, and inland
fifty miles,--two hundred miles, according, we had almost said, to the
position of the last Arab or Kabyle raid and insurrection.

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,