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 pursued with no slack hand, until astonished Europe finds another Cherbourg, a safe harbor, ample means of repair, and frowning guns to repel all invaders. Imprudent Young France, indeed, whispers now that Algiers makes the Mediterranean a French lake. But that is a little premature. While Gibraltar and Malta hold safely their harbors, and England's naval power is unbroken, no nation can truly make this boast.
The next enterprise of France was hardly so creditable to her as the Algerine conquest. Midway in the Pacific is the island of Tahita or Otaheite,—as fair a gem as the sun ever looked down upon. The soft and balmy air,—the undulating surface, rising to mountains and sinking into deep valleys, luxuriant with tropical verdure,—the distant girdle of coral reefs, which holds the island set in a circlet of tranquil blue waters,—the gentle and indolent temper of the natives,—have all conspired to throw an air of romance around the very name Otaheite. The Christian world is bound to it by another tie. For thither came Protestant missionaries, drawn by the reports of the tractable disposition of the islanders, and labored with such success that in 1817 the king and all his subjects espoused Christianity.
Into this island Eden discord came in the guise of a Roman catechist, who was sent thither for the express purpose of proselyting. As if aware of the nature of his ungracious task, he disguised his real character. But he was detected, and, together with a companion who had joined him, was dismissed from the island by Queen Pomare, who dreaded the sectarian strife his presence would awaken. This was her whole offence. Four years later, in 1838, when the whole transaction might well have been forgotten, Captain De Petit Thouars appeared in the French frigate Venus, and demanded and obtained satisfaction in the sum of two thousand piastres Spanish, and freedom for Catholic worship. In two subsequent visits, though no new offence had been given, he increased the severity of his demands, first putting the island under a protectorate, and finally, in 1843, taking full possession of it as a French colony. The helpless Queen appealed to Louis Philippe, who returned the island, but reaffirmed the protectorate.
This same French protectorate is a rare piece of ponderous irony. The French governor collects all export and import duties, writes all state-papers, assembles and dismisses the island legislature according to his good pleasure, doles out to the Queen a yearly allowance of a thousand pounds, puts her in duress in her own house, if her conduct displeases him, and will not allow her to see strangers, except by his permission. Few will believe that zeal for the honor of the Catholic Church prompted Louis Philippe to inflict so disproportioned a punishment. That the island is the best victualling-station in the South Pacific is a far greater sin, and one for which there could be in covetous eyes no adequate punishment, except that seizure which is so modestly termed a protectorate.
Pass now from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. There is the little rocky island of St. Paul, situated in the same latitude as Cape Town and Melbourne; and, planted with singular accuracy equidistant from the two, it is the only place of shelter in the long route between them. Its harbor, if harbor it may be called, is the most secure, the most secluded, and the most romantic, perhaps, in the whole world. St. Paul is of volcanic origin. It is, indeed, little more than an extinct crater with a narrow rim of land around it to separate it from the sea. Through this rim the waters of the great Indian Ocean have cut a channel. The crater has thus become a beautiful salt lake, a mile in diameter, clear, deep, almost circular, and from whose border, on every side, rise the old volcanic walls draped in verdure. The strait connecting it with the sea is but three hundred feet wide, and at high tide ten feet deep,—thus affording an easy passage for small vessels into this most delightful seclusion; and no doubt the strait might be so deepened as to float the largest ships. St. Paul is not at present much frequented. But in a sea which is every year becoming more populous with the commerce of every nation, who shall tell what such a central station may become? Its title was somewhat uncertain. England thought she held it as a dependency of Mauritius. But in 1847 the governor of Bourbon, with a happy audacity, took possession of it, as an outpost of his own island, and planted a little French colony of fishermen. We have not heard that the assumption has been disputed.
No doubt, most of our readers may have observed in the daily prints occasional allusions to the French War in Cochin China. Probably few have understood the full meaning of the facts so quietly chronicled. Perhaps none have dreamed that they were reading the first notices of a new Eastern conquest, which, in extent and importance, may yet be second only to that which has already been achieved by the British in Hindostan. Yet so it is. The Cambodia is the largest river in Southern Asia, and, together with the smaller and parallel river of Saigon, drains a tract of not less than five hundred thousand square miles. The region for which the French have been contending includes the provinces which cluster around the mouths of these two rivers, and command them. No position could be happier. For while on the one hand it controls the outlet of a river stretching up into a rich and fertile country eighteen hundred miles, on the other it projects into the Chinese Sea at a point nearly midway between Singapore and Hong Kong, and so secures to its possessor a just influence in that commercial highway. The ostensible cause of the war in this region was the murder of a French missionary. If this was ever the real cause, it long since gave way to a settled purpose of conquest.