ork,
nine miles long, surrounding the city, and, to protect this, he raised
eleven great forts and eighteen redoubts.

Still the harbor was open, and into this the English fleet might return
and succor the city at any time. His plan was soon made. In the midst of
that great harbor of La Rochelle he sank sixty hulks of vessels filled
with stone; then, across the harbor,--nearly a mile wide, and, in
places, more than eight hundred feet deep,--he began building over these
sunken ships a great dike and wall,--thoroughly fortified, carefully
engineered, faced with sloping layers of hewn stone. His own men scolded
at the magnitude of the work,--the men in La Rochelle laughed at
it. Worse than that, the Ocean sometimes laughed and scolded at it.
Sometimes the waves sweeping in from that fierce Bay of Biscay destroyed
in an hour the work of a week. The carelessness of a subordinate once
destroyed in a moment the work of three months.

Yet it is but fair to admit that there was one storm which did not beat
against Richelieu's dike. There set in against it no storm of hypocrisy
from neighboring nations. Keen works for and against Richelieu were put
forth in his day,--works calm and strong for and against him have been
issuing from the presses of France and England and Germany ever since;
but not one of the old school of keen writers or of the new school of
calm writers is known to have ever hinted that this complete sealing of
the only entrance to a leading European harbor was unjust to the world
at large or unfair to the besieged themselves.

But all other obstacles Richelieu had to break through or cut through
constantly. He was his own engineer, general, admiral, prime-minister.
While he urged on the army to work upon the dike, he organized a French
navy, and in due time brought it around to that coast and anchored it so
as to guard the dike and to be guarded by it.

Yet, daring as all this work was, it was but the smallest part of his
work. Richelieu found that his officers were cheating his soldiers
in their pay and disheartening them; in face of the enemy he had to
reorganize the army and to create a new military system. He made the
army twice as effective and supported it at two-thirds less cost than
before. It was his boast in his "Testament," that, from a mob, the
army became "like a well-ordered convent." He found also that his
subordinates were plundering the surrounding country, and thus rendering
it disaffected;