The first counsel of wisdom was to make the number of her sailors greater. France has, at the most liberal estimate, only one hundred and fifty thousand men at all conversant with the sea; while England has, including boatmen, fishermen, coasters, and sailors of long voyages, the enormous number of eight hundred thousand. Remove this disproportion and you settle the whole question. Unfortunately, this is a matter in which government can do but little, while national tastes and habits do everything. No despotism can make a commercial marine where no commercial spirit is. And no voice, charm it ever so wisely, can draw the peasant of France from his vine-clad hills and plains. The French rulers have done what they could. They have fostered, with a steady and liberal hand, the fisheries. Every spring, twenty thousand men have set sail to that best nursery of seamanship,—the Banks of Newfoundland. These men are paid a bounty by Government, and, in return, are subjected to a naval discipline, and, upon an emergency, are liable at a moment's notice to enter into the naval service. To quicken mercantile enterprise, by which alone mariners can be called into existence, enormous subsidies have been paid to the great lines of steamers to Brazil and the East. And the yearning for colonies, which in our day has led to almost simultaneous attempts to found settlements in both hemispheres and in all waters, has no doubt for a leading cause the desire to build up a mercantile marine, and with it a numerous body of expert seamen. If these efforts have not accomplished all that their projectors could wish, it is not because their plans lacked sagacity, but because it is hard to put the genius of the sea into the breasts of men who are essentially landsmen.
To increase the number of French sailors would unquestionably be the best possible method of adding to French naval power. But suppose that this cannot be done. Supposes that there is in the heart of the French people an invincible attachment to the soil, which makes them deaf to every siren of the sea. What is the next counsel of wisdom? This, is it not? To make what sailors you have efficient and available for naval emergencies. In this respect the French authorities have achieved an entire success. Every sailor, nay, every man whose employment savors at all of maritime life, though he be only a boatman plying the river, or a laborer in harbor or dock, is enrolled in what is called the marine inscription,—thenceforward in all times of need to be called into active service. This puts the whole seafaring population at the disposal of Government. Nor is this all. Regular drafts are made upon the seamen; and it is computed that in every period of nine years all the sailors of France serve in their turn in the navy. They are trained in all that belongs to naval duty: in the use of ships' guns, in the sailing of great ships, and in the evolutions of fleets. No matter how sudden the call, or from what direction the sailors are taken, no French fleet leaves or can leave port with a crew of green hands.
The training which is given to sailors actually in service is an equally important matter. The French Admiralty keeps no drones in its employ; certainly it does not promote them to places of trust. Honors are won, not bought. Every step up, from midshipman to admiral, must be the result of honorable service, and actual proficiency both in the theory and practice of a sailor's profession. The modern French naval officer is master of his business, fit to compete with the best skill of the best maritime races. Then the sailors themselves are trained. Even in time of peace, twenty-five thousand are kept in service. Gathered on board great experimental fleets, officers and men alike are schooled in all branches of nautical duty. In port or out of it, they are not idle. Every day a prescribed routine of exercise is rigidly enforced. Great have been the results. The French sailor of 1863 is not a reproduction of the sailor of 1800. In alertness, in knowledge, in silent obedience, he is a great improvement upon his predecessor. Actual experiment shows that a French crew will weigh anchor, spread and furl sail, replace spars or running-ringing, lower or raise topmasts, or perform any other duty pertaining to a ship, with as much celerity as the crew of any other nation. And no confusion, no babbling of many voices, such as the British writers of the last generations delighted to describe, mars the beauty of the evolutions. One mind directs, and one voice alone breaks the stillness. Since the Crimean War, the English speak with respect of French seamanship; and though they do not believe that it is equal to their own, they do not scruple to allow that a naval battle would be disputed now with a fierceness hitherto unknown.
All that sagacity and experience would prompt has been attempted. All that training and discipline can do has already been accomplished. Yet there is one source of weakness for which there can be no remedy. France has no naval reserves. And if she war with England, she will need them. To put her marine on a war-basis would require all her available seamen. To fill the gaps of war, she has not, and she cannot have, until a truly commercial spirit grows up in the hearts of her people, the multitudes of reserved men, more familiar with the sea than the land, such as swarm in English ports. Yet, with every deduction, her capacity of naval production, her strong fleets, and her trained seamen make her a naval power whose might no one can estimate, and whose assault any nation may well shun by all means except the sacrifice of honor and rights.
If now we turn from the naval progress of France to her recent colonial enterprises, we shall find fresh evidence that she has resumed that contest which came to so disastrous a close fifty years ago. The old dream of colonial empire has come back again. This was inevitable. A great nation like France cannot always drink the cup of humiliation. With an ambition no less high and arrogant than that which pervades the British mind, she would plant far and wide French ideas and civilization. While England has colonies scattered in every part of the habitable globe, while Holland has almost monopolized the rich islands of the Eastern Archipelago, and while even Spain has Manila in the East and Cuba in the West, it could hardly be expected that France, the equal of either, and in some respects the superior of all, should rest content with a virtual exclusion from everything but her narrow home-possessions.
And then, however disguised, there is in the heart of France an intense naval rivalry of England. Though the stern logic of events has been against her more than once, she does not accept the verdict. She means to revise it with a strong hand. But she must have a navy, and a navy cannot exhibit its highest vigor, unless it have a just foundation in an energetic, wide-ranging commerce. And such a commerce cannot exist except it have its depots and its agencies, its outlets and its markets, everywhere. Above all, we are to seek the source of this new colonial ambition in the character and purposes of that singular man who controls the destinies of France. Not even his enemies would now question his ability. The power he wields in Europe, the impression he has stamped upon its policy, the skill with which he has made even his foes minister to his greatness, all 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, 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.