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
pu