Chapter VII: Part 7

History, however, does not mind the rain: agriculture must. More especially in any view of British agriculture, whether old or new, and in any estimate of its theories or progress, due consideration must be had for the generous dampness of the British atmosphere. To this cause is to be attributed primarily that wonderful velvety turf which is so unmatchable elsewhere; to the same cause, and to the accompanying even temperature, is to be credited very much of the success of the turnip-culture, which has within a century revolutionized the agriculture of Kugland; yet again, the magical effects of a thorough system of drainage are nowhere so demonstrable as in a soil constantly wetted, and giving a steady flow, however small, to the discharging tile. Measured by inches, the rain-fall is greater in most parts of America than in Great Britain; but this fall is so capricious with us, often so sudden and violent, that there must be inevitably a large surface-discharge, even though the tile, three feet below, is in working order. The true theory of skilful drainage is, not to carry away the quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil too heavily saturated by opening new outflows, setting new currents astir of both air and moisture, and thus giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands that were dead with a stagnant over-soak.

Bearing in mind, then, the conditions of the British climate, which are so much in keeping with the "wet weather" of these studies, let us go back again to old Markham's day, and amble along--armed with our umbrellas--through the current of the seventeenth century.

James I., that conceited old pedant, whose "Counterblast to Tobacco" has worked the poorest of results, seems to have had a nice taste for fruits; and Sir Henry Wotton, his ambassador at Venice, writing from that city in 1622, says,--"I have sent the choicest melon-seeds of all kinds, which His Majesty doth expect, as I had order both from ray Lord Holderness and from Mr. Secretary Calvert." Sir Henry sent also with the seeds very particular directions for the culture of the plants, obtained probably from some head-gardener of a Priuli or a Morosini, whose melons had the full beat of Italian sunshine upon the south slopes of the Vicentine mountains. The same ambassador sends at that date to Lord Holderness "a double-flowering yellow rose, of no ordinary nature";[3] and it would be counted of no ordinary nature now, if what he avers be true, that "it flowreth every month from May till almost Christmas."

King James took special interest in the establishment of his garden at the Theobald Palace in Hertfordshire: there were clipped hedges, neat array of linden avenues, fountains, and a Mount of Venus within a labyrinth; twelve miles of wall encircled the park, and the soldiers of Cromwell found fine foraging-ground in it, when they entered upon the premises a few years later. The schoolmaster-king formed also a guild of gardeners in the city of London, at whose hands certificates of capacity for garden-work were demanded, and these to be given only after proper examination of the applicants. Lord Bacon possessed a beautiful garden, if we may trust his own hints to that effect, and the added praises of Wotton. Cashiobury, Holland House, and Greenwich gardens were all noted in this time; and the experiments and successes of the proprietor of Bednall-Greene garden I have already alluded to. But the country-gentleman, who lived upon his land and directed the cultivation of his property, was but a very savage type of the Bedford or Oxfordshire landholders of our day. It involved a muddy drag over bad roads, after a heavy Flemish mare, to bring either one's self or one's crops to market.

Sir Thomas Overbury, who draws such a tender picture of a "Milke-Mayde," is severe, and, I dare say, truthful, upon the country-gentleman. "His conversation," says he, "amongst his tenants is desperate: but amongst his equals full of doubt. His travel is seldome farther than the next market towne, and his inquisition is about the price of corne: when he travelleth, he will goe ten mile out of the way to a cousins house of his to save charges; and rewards servants by taking them by the hand when hee departs. Nothing under a _sub-poena_ can draw him to _London_: and when he is there, he sticks fast upon every object, casts his eyes away upon gazing, and becomes the prey of every cut-purse. When he comes home, those wonders serve him for his holy-day talke. If he goe to court, it is in yellow stockings: and if it be in winter, in a slight tafety cloake, and pumps and pantofles."

The portrait of the smaller farmer, who, in this time, tilled his own ground, is even more severely sketched by Bishop Earle. "A plain country fellow is one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lye fallow and unfilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and not enough to be idle or melancholy.... His hand guides the plough, and the plough his thoughts, and his ditch and land-mark is the very mound of his meditations. He expostulates with his oxen very understandingly, and speaks _gee_, and _ree_, better than English. His mind is not much distracted with objects, but if a good fat cow come in his way, he stands dumb and astonished, and though his haste be never so great, wilt fix here half an hours contemplation. His habitation is some poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn by the loop-holes that let out smoak, which the rain had long since washed through, but for the double ceiling of bacon on the inside, which has hung there from his grand-sires time, and is yet to make rashers for posterity. He apprehends Gods blessings only in a good year, or a fat pasture, and never praises him but on _good ground_."

Such were the men who were to be reached by the agricultural literature of the day! Yet, notwithstanding this unpromising audience, scarcely a year passed but some talker was found who felt himself competent to expound the whole art and mystery of husbandry.

Adam Speed, Gent., (from which title we may presume that he was no Puritan,) published a little book in the year 1626, which he wittily called "Adam out of Eden." In this he undertakes to show how Adam, under the embarrassing circumstance of being shut out of Paradise, may increase the product of a farm from two hundred pounds to two thousand pounds a year by the rearing of rabbits on furze and broom! It is all mathematically computed; there is nothing to disappoint in the figures; but I suspect there might be in the rabbits.

Gentleman Speed speaks of turnips, clover, and potatoes; he advises the boiling of "butchers' blood" for poultry, and mixing the "pudding" with bran and other condiments, which will "feed the beasts very fat."

The author of "Adam out of Eden" also indulges himself in verse, which is certainly not up to the measure of "Paradise Lost." This is its taste:--

"Each soyl hath no liking of every grain,
Nor barley nor wheat is for every vein;
Yet know I no country so barren of soyl
But some kind of come may be gotten with toyl.
Though husband at home be to count the cost what,
Yet thus huswife within is as needful as that:
What helpeth in store to have never so much,
Half lost by ill-usage, ill huswifes, and such?"

The papers of Bacon upon subjects connected with rural life are so familiar that I need not recur to them. His particular suggestions, however sound in themselves, (and they generally are sound,) did by no means measure the extent of his contribution to the growth of good husbandry. But the more thorough methods of investigation which he instituted and encouraged gave a new and healthier direction to inquiries connected not only with agriculture, but with every experimental art.

Thus, Gabriel Platte, publishing his "Observations and Improvements in Husbandry," about the year 1638, thinks it necessary to sustain and illustrate them with a record of "twenty experiments."

Sir Richard Weston, too, a sensible up-country knight, has travelled through Flanders about the same time, and has seen such success attending upon the turnip and the clover culture there, that he urges the same upon his fellow-landholders, in a "Discourse of Husbandrie."

The book was published under the name of Hartlib,--the same Master Samuel Hartlib to whom Milton addressed his tractate "Of Education," and of whom the great poet speaks as "a person sent hither [to England] by some good Providence from a far country, to be the occasion and incitement of great good to this island."

This mention makes us curious to know something more of Master Samuel Hartlib. I find that he was the son of a Polish merchant, of Lithuania, was himself engaged for a time in commercial transactions, and came to England about the year 1640. He wrote several theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths "the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mystery." The work published under his name entitled "The Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, embraces epistles from various farmers, who may be supposed to represent the progressive agriculture of England. Among these letters I note one upon "Snaggreet," (shelly earth from river-beds); another upon "Seaweeds"; a third upon "Sea-sand"; and a fourth upon "Woollen-rags."

Hartlib was in good odor during the days of the Commonwealth; for he lived long enough to see that bitter tragedy of the executed king before Whitehall Palace, and to hold over to the early years of the Restoration. But he was not in favor with the people about Charles II.; the small pension that Cromwell had bestowed fell into sad arrearages; and the story is, that he died miserably poor.

It is noticeable that Hartlib, and a great many sensible old gentlemen of his date, spoke of the art of husbandry as a mystery. And so it is; a mystery then, and a mystery now. Nothing tries my patience more than to meet one of those billet-headed farmers who--whether in print or in talk--pretend to have solved the mystery and mastered it.

Take my own crop of corn yonder upon the flat, which I have watched since the day when it first shot up its little dainty spears of green, until now it spindles has been faithfully ploughed and fed and tilled; but how gross appliances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that have been searching, day by day, every cranny of the soil,--to the broad leaflets that, week by week, have stolen out from their green sheaths to wanton with the wind and caress the dews! Is there any quick-witted farmer who shall tell us with anything like definiteness what the phosphates have contributed to all this, and how much the nitrogenous manures, and to what degree the deposits of _humus_? He may establish the conditions of a sure crop, thirty, forty, or sixty bushels to the acre, (seasons favoring); but how short a reach is this toward determining the final capacity of either soil or plant! How often the most petted experiments laugh us in the face! The great miracle of the vital laboratory in the plant remains to mock us. We test it; we humor it; we fondly believe that we have detected its secret: but the mystery stays.

A bumpkin may rear a crop that shall keep him from starvation; but to develop the _utmost_ capacity of a given soil by fertilizing appliances, or by those of tillage, is the work, I suspect, of a wiser man than belongs to our day. And when I find one who fancies he has resolved all the conditions which contribute to this miracle of God's, and can control and fructify at his will, I have less respect for his head than for a good one--of Savoy cabbage. The great problem of Adam's curse is not worked out so easily. The sweating is not over yet.

If we are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems a crowning development; whereas it presently appears that we have only opened a new door upon some further labyrinth.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the progress in husbandry, without being at any one period very brilliant, was decided and constant. If there was anything like a relapse, and neglect of good culture, it was most marked shortly after the Restoration. The country-gentlemen, who had entertained a wholesome horror of Cromwell and his troopers, had, during the Commonwealth, devoted themselves to a quiet life upon their estates, repairing the damages which the Civil War had wrought in their fortunes and in their lands. The high price of farm-products stimulated their efforts, and their country-isolation permitted a harmless show of the chivalrous contempt they entertained for the _novi homines_ of the Commonwealth. With the return of Charles they abandoned their estates once more to the bailiffs, and made a rush for the town and for their share of the "leeks and onions."

But the earnest men were at work. Sainfoin and turnips were growing every year into credit. The potato was becoming a crop of value; and in the year 1664 a certain John Foster devoted a treatise to it, entitled, "England's Happiness increased, or a Sure Remedy against all Succeeding Dear Years, by a Plantation of Roots called Potatoes."

For a long time the crop had been known, and Sir Thomas Overbury had made it the vehicle of one of his sharp witticisms against people who were forever boasting of their ancestry,--their best part being below ground. But Foster anticipates the full value of what had before been counted a novelty and a curiosity. He advises how custards, paste, puddings, and even bread, may be made from the flour of potatoes.

John Worlidge (1669) gives a full system of husbandry, advising green fallows, and even recommending and describing a drill for the putting in of seed, and for distributing with it a fine fertilizer.

Evelyn, also, about this time, gave a dignity to rural pursuits by his "Sylva" and "Terra," both these treatises having been recited before the Royal Society. The "Terra" is something muddy,[4] and is by no means exhaustive; but the "Sylva" for more than a century was the British planter's hand-book, being a judicious, sensible, and eloquent treatise upon a subject as wide and as beautiful as its title. Even Walter Scott,--himself a capital woodsman,--when he tells (in "Kenilworth") of the approach of Tressilian and his Doctor companion to the neighborhood of Say's Court, cannot forego his tribute to the worthy and cultivated author who once lived there, and who in his "Sylva" gave a manual to every British planter, and in his life an exemplar to every British gentleman.

Evelyn was educated at Oxford, travelled widely upon the Continent, was a firm adherent of the royal party, and at one time a member of Prince Rupert's famous troop. He married the daughter of the British ambassador in Paris, through whom he came into possession of Say's Court, which he made a gem of beauty. But in his later years he had the annoyance of seeing his fine parterres and shrubbery trampled down by that Northern boor, Peter the Great, who made his residence there while studying the mysteries of ship-building at Deptford, and who had as little reverence for a parterre of flowers as for any other of the tenderer graces of life.

The British monarchs have always been more regardful of those interests which were the object of Evelyn's tender devotion. I have already alluded to the horticultural fancies of James I. His son Charles was an extreme lover of flowers, as well as of a great many luxuries which hedged him against all Puritan sympathy. "Who knows not," says Milton, in his reply to the [Greek: EIKÔN BASIAIKÊ], "the licentious remissness of his Sunday's theatre, accompanied with that reverend statute for dominical jigs and May-poles, published in his own name," etc.?

But the poor king was fated to have little enjoyment of either jigs or May-poles; harsher work belonged to his reign; and all his garden-delights came to be limited finally to a little pot of flowers upon his prison-window. And I can easily believe that the elegant, wrong-headed, courteous gentleman tended these poor flowers daintily to the very last, and snuffed their fragrance with a Christian gratitude.

Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as well as of Nature. I wonder if it ever happened to him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke, to come upon Milton's "L'Allegro," (first printed in the very year of the Battle of Naseby,) and to read,--

"In thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And if I give thee honor due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreprovèd pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And, singing, startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweetbrier, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine."

How it must have smitten the King's heart to remember that the tender poet, whose rhythm none could appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the last props that held up his tottering throne!

Cromwell, as we have seen, gave Master Hartlib a pension; but whether on the score of his theological tracts, or his design for an agricultural college, would be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the Protector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of trees was measured by their capacity for timber. Yet that rare masculine energy, which he and his men carried with them in their tread all over England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive agriculture.

Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In his long residence at Paris he had grown into a great fondness for the French gardens. He afterward sent for Le Notre--who had laid out Versailles at an expense of twenty millions of dollars--to superintend the planting of Greenwich and St. James. Fortunately, no strict imitation of Versailles was entered upon. The splendors of Chatsworth Garden grew in this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn; a stately conservatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster-vegetation of the Eastern archipelago; the little glass temple is in the gardens, under which the Victoria lily was first coaxed into British bloom; a model village has sprung up at the Park gates, in which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on rural ornamentation. But the sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,--clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to--sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim upon your eye,--if they were the mere setting to a monster palace, whose colonnades and balusters of marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long green lines, which are only lost to the eye where a distant fountain dashes its spray of golden dust into the air,--as at Versailles,--there would be keeping. But the Devonshire palace has quite other setting. Blue Derbyshire hills are behind it; a grand, billowy slope of the comeliest park-land in England rolls down from its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under hoary oaks, washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow as charming and limpid as one of Virgil's eclogues. It is such a setting that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a fine woman of Charles's court.

This brings us upon our line of march again. Charles II. loved stiff gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his

"topiary box a-row."

Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his advocacy and example. The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes,--"My Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age"). So also that famous garden of Moor-Park in Hertfordshire, laid out by the witty Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces. Sir William Temple praises it beyond reason in his "Garden of Epicurus," and cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of garden-figures which the Chinese so much affect. He admires only stateliness and primness. "Among us," he says, "the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact Distances."

From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century. Even Waller, the poet,--whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could not be thrown away idly,--spent a large sum in levelling the hills about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.)

Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric formalities with the rounded graces of the garden which he planted in Eden. There

"the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain."

Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise--the ideal of man's happiest estate--variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller and of Hampton Court.

And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a bird's-eye glance at rural England.

It is raining; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn by stout Flemish mares,--for thorough-breds are as yet unknown,--is covered with a sail-cloth to keep the wet away from the six "insides." The grass, wherever the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now. The wheat in the near county of Herts is fair, and will turn twenty bushels to the acre; here and there an enterprising landholder has a small field of dibbled grain, which will yield a third more. John Worlidge's drill is not in request, and is only talked of by a few wiseacres who prophesy its ultimate adoption. The fat bullocks of Bedford will not dress more than seven hundred a head; and the cows, if killed, would not overrun five hundred weight. There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of turnips; but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies of cranes.

The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care of some pupil of Wise, or of Parkinson, have their espaliers,--their plums, their pears,[5] and their grapes. These last are rare, however, (Parkinson says sour, too,) and bear a great price in the London market. One or two horticulturists of extraordinary enterprise have built greenhouses, warmed, Evelyn says, "in a most ingenious way, by passing a brick flue underneath the beds."

The lesser country-gentlemen, who have no establishments in town, rarely venture up, for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of the black-guard Cockneys. Their wives are staid dames, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery,--but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches. A great many of the older exotic plants have become domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,--but not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a Non-Conformist, Baxter's "Saint's Rest"; while the husband regales himself with a thumb-worn copy of "Sir Fopling Flutter," or, if he live well into the closing years of the century, with De Foe's "True-born Englishman."

Poetic feeling was more lacking in the country-life than in the illustrative literature of the century. To say nothing of Milton's brilliant little poems, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," which flash all over with the dews, there are the charming "Characters" of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the graceful discourse of Sir William Temple. The poet Drummond wrought a music out of the woods and waters which lingers alluringly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys of Hawthornden. John Dryden, though a thorough cit, and a man who would have preferred his arm-chair at Will's Coffee-House to Chatsworth and the fee of all its lands, has yet touched most tenderly the "daisies white" and the spring, in his "Flower and the Leaf."

But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet day to a close with the naming of two honored pastorals. The first, in sober prose, is nothing more nor less than Walton's "Angler." Its homeliness, its calm, sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty perfume of flowers, its delicate shadowing-forth of the Christian sentiment which lived by old English firesides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the highest style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infinitely better,)--these make the "Angler" a book that stands among the thumb-worn. There is good marrowy English in it; I know very few fine writers of our times who could make a better book on such a subject to-day,--with all the added information, and all the practice of the newspaper-columns. What Walton wants to say he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them--straight.

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphrey Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends--capital fishermen--whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.

I do not think I should have trusted in such a matter Charles Cotton, although he was agricultural as well as piscatory,--having published a "Planter's Manual." I think he could, and did, draw a long bow. I suspect innocent milkmaids were not in the habit of singing Kit Marlowe's songs to the worshipful Mr. Cotton.

One pastoral remains to mention, published at the very opening of the year 1600, and spending its fine forest-aroma thenceforward all down the century. I mean Shakspeare's play of "As You Like It."

From beginning to end the grand old forest of Arden is astir overhead; from beginning to end the brooks brawl in your ear; from beginning to end you smell the bruised ferns and the delicate-scented wood-flowers. It is Theocritus again, with the civilization of the added centuries contributing its spangles of reason, philosophy, and grace. Who among all the short-kirtled damsels of all the eclogues will match us this fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirthful, buxom Rosalind? Nowhere in books have we met with her like,--but only at some long-gone picnic in the woods, where we worshipped "blushing sixteen" in dainty boots and white muslin. There, too, we met a match for sighing Orlando,--mirrored in the water; there, too, some diluted Jaques may have "moralized" the excursion for next day's "Courier," and some lout of a Touchstone (there are always such in picnics) passed the ices, made poor puns, and won more than his share of the smiles.

Walton is English all over; but "As You Like It" is as broad as the sky, or love, or folly, or hope.

* * * * *

THE FRENCH STRUGGLE FOR NAVAL AND COLONIAL POWER.

In comparison with our national misfortunes all beside seems trifling. Else nothing would so fasten our attention as the French invasion and conquest of Mexico. A dependency of France established at our door! The most restless, ambitious, and warlike nation in Europe our neighbor! Who shall tell what results, momentous and lasting, may follow in the train of such events?

What is the explanation of this conquest? Is it the freak of an ambitious despot? Or is it only a stroke in the line of a settled policy? one fact, which we see, amid a great number of facts which we do not see?

This particular enterprise comes close to us. It affronts our pride and tramples upon our political traditions. It establishes, what we did not wish to see on this Western Continent, another foreign jurisdiction. But for more than twenty-five years France has been engaged in a series of like enterprises. In places not so near to us, by the same arbitrary methods, she has already achieved conquests as important. With soft-footed ambition, she has planted her flag and reared her strongholds on spots full of natural advantages. But the aim is the same everywhere: the reëstablishment of her lost colonial and naval power. And the hope of France is, that in the race for mercantile and naval greatness she may yet challenge and vanquish the Sovereign of the Seas.

* * * * *

The peace of 1815 left France with her naval and colonial power broken apparently beyond hope. Even in the thirteen years preceding that peace England had taken or destroyed not less than six hundred of her war-ships. In the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic, amid the islands of the West Indies, in the far-off golden East, wherever contending, fleet against fleet, or ship with ship, everywhere she had been vanquished and driven from the sea. That boundless colonial empire, of which Dupleix in the East dreamed, and for whose establishment in the West Montcalm fought and died, had shrunk to a few fishing-ports off the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a few sugar-islands in the West Indies, and some unarmed factories dotting the coasts of Africa and the shores of Hindostan, and existing by British grace and permission. To so low an estate had fallen that towering ambition which thought to exercise uncontrolled dominion over this continent, to rule with more than regal sway the rich islands and peninsulas of Asia, and to dictate peace to fallen England from the guns of her armadas. After five wars waged with no craven spirit in less than three-quarters of a century, after she had exhausted every resource and more than once banded against her island foe every naval power in Europe, she was forced to succumb to British perseverance and to the gallantry of British sailors. The peace, which came not a moment too soon, found her with a navy literally annihilated, and with little remaining of her colonial empire but the memory. When we compare this hopeless failure with the mercantile activity and naval force of Modern France,--when we call up, in imagination, her new colonies, the germs almost of empires,--we cannot admire too much the courage and energy which have called into existence such magnificent resources. To what are we to attribute this stupendous change? What have been the methods of this growth? By what steps has this grand progress from weakness to strength been achieved?

* * * * *

In such a work of restoration, France had everything to create,--ships, armaments, machinery, and sailors even, to replace those who had fallen in the front of battle. To produce capacity of production was her first work,--to establish new ports or replenish old ones, to build docks, to rear workshops, to gather materials. This is what she has been doing. Silently and steadily she has been laying the foundations of maritime greatness. Her ports, in everything which contributes to naval efficiency,--in size, in mechanical appliances, in concentration upon one spot of all the trades and all the resources necessary for the construction and repair of war-ships,--excel all other naval depots in the world.

This is no exaggeration. There is the port of Cherbourg. Originally it was little more than an open bay, hollowed by the waters of the English Channel in the French coast, with a rocky shore exposed to every northern blast. But it was situated just where France needed a harbor, midway on her northern coast, facing England. Across this open bay, as a chord subtends its arc, a gigantic sea-wall has been stretched. Built in deep water more than a mile from the head of the bay, it extends almost from shore to shore. It is nearly three miles long. It is scarcely less than nine hundred feet wide at its base. Rising from the bed of the sea sixty-six feet, it is firm enough to bear up fortresses strong as human engineering can rear. This is the famous _digue_ of Cherbourg. Its construction has been a seventy years' battle with the elements. Many times the waves have destroyed the work of years. Once a furious tempest swept away the whole superstructure, with its forts, armaments, barracks, and even garrison. But failure has only awakened fresh energy, and it stands now complete and rooted in the sea like a reef. At each end of the _digue_, between it and the main land, are broad ship-channels, affording a free passage at all tides to the largest ships. Thus science has called into existence a safe harbor, protected from the assaults of the sea by its granite barrier,--protected none the less from man's assaults by the concentric fire of more than six hundred guns.

This is but the exterior of Cherbourg. In the bosom of the rocky cliffs of its western shore three basins or docks have been hewn with gigantic toil. The first, finished in 1813, is 950 feet long, 768 feet wide, and 55 feet deep, and will hold securely fifteen ships of the line. The second, of somewhat smaller dimensions, was completed in 1829, and will float a dozen ships. The third, far larger than either, was opened with great ceremony in 1858: it is 1365 feet long, 650 feet wide, and 60 feet deep, and will contain eighteen or twenty ships of the largest size. On the sides of these basins are twelve building-slips and seven docks. And radiating from them, and in close contiguity, are arsenals, storehouses, timber-yards, ropewalks, sail-lofts, bakeries, and machine-shops capable of turning out marine engines, anchors, cables, and indeed every piece of iron-work which enters into the construction of a ship. It is no vain boast that an army of a hundred thousand men can be embarked any fine morning at Cherbourg, and that the fleet necessary for its transport can be built and armed and equipped and protected to the hour of its departure in this fortified haven.

Yet Cherbourg is but one of five ports equally efficient, equally protected, and equally furnished with the products of mechanic and nautical invention. Brest, L'Orient, and Rochefort, on the west, have far greater natural and scarcely less acquired advantages; while the old port of Toulon on the Mediterranean, old only in name, has been so enlarged and strengthened, that it can supply for the southern waters all and more than Cherbourg does for the northern. One fact will show to what an extent this power of naval production has been carried. In these five ports are some eighty building-slips or houses, and twenty-five docks, and, connected with them, all the materials, all the trades, all the labor-saving machines, all the mechanical forces, which the nineteenth century knows. If she wished, France could build at the same time forty ships of the line and forty frigates, while twenty-five more were undergoing repairs. The result of all this activity is, that, in extent, in completeness, in concentration of forces upon the right spot, the naval ports and dockyards of France are absolutely unequalled. And the work goes on. To-day twenty-two thousand men are employed upon naval works. Within six months a wet dock has been completed at Toulon, and another at L'Orient, while at Brest great ranges of workshops are hastening to completion; and it is whispered that at Cherbourg another basin is, like its predecessors, to be chiselled out of the solid rock.

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Do we ask now what France has gained, in fleets and armaments, from this immense work of preparation? Everything. Not to dwell upon sailing-ships, which the progress of invention has made of inferior worth, she has a steam-navy second to that of no power in Europe. Her present ruler has fully appreciated the importance of that new element in naval warfare, steam,--an element all the more important to France, that it tends to lower the value of mere seamanship, in which she has always been deficient, and to increase the value of scientific knowledge and training, in which she has ever been with the foremost. For ten years her energy has been tasked to produce steamships of the greatest power and of the finest models. Since 1852 her ships of the line have increased from two to forty, and her frigates from twenty-one to forty-six. A fleet has thus been created which is numerically equal to that of England, and which, so far as these things depend upon the stanchness of the ships and the weight of the armaments, is perhaps in force and efficiency superior.

If we turn our attention to iron-clad ships, we shall see best displayed the sagacity, energy, and secretiveness of Louis Napoleon. In the Crimean War, three floating batteries covered with iron slabs, and each mounting eighteen fifty-pounders, silenced the Russian fort at Kinburn. This was a lesson it would seem that any one might learn. Louis Napoleon did not fail to learn it. If a ship can be made invulnerable, or nearly so, in every part, then of what avail is that strategy which secures choice of position, and which, of old, almost decided the battle? Will not he come off victor who can produce guns from which the heaviest shot may be hurled at the highest velocity, and gunners who shall launch them on their errand of destruction with the greatest accuracy? The French emperor has fairly overreached his island rivals. While they were experimenting, he laid the keels of two iron-clads of six thousand tons burden. In 1859 he ordered the construction of twenty steel-clad frigates and fifty gunboats. Lord Clarence Paget declared in debate last March, that, while England had, finished or constructing, only sixteen iron-clad frigates, France had thirty-one. And even this takes no account of floating-batteries and gunboats, wholly or in part protected, and of which, if we are to trust her papers, France has an almost fabulous number.

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But who shall man this fleet? Where are the skilful mariners to make efficient these tremendous elements of naval power? It was Lord Nelson, I think, who exclaimed, when he saw the stanch ships of Spain, "Thank God, Spaniards cannot build men!" The recent changes in naval construction, decreasing perhaps the relative worth of mere seamanship, may have made the exclamation less pertinent than of old. But, after all, on the rude and stormy ocean, proverbially fickle and uncertain, nothing can take the place of sailors,--of brave and skilful men, trained by long struggle with wind and wave, calm in danger, apt in emergencies, finding the narrow path of safety where common eyes see only peril and ruin. France understands tins. She knows how many of her past humiliations can be traced directly to defective seamanship. But where to seek the remedy? How to find or make sailors fit to contend with those who were almost born and bred on the restless surge? By what methods, with a slender commercial marine and a people reluctant to encounter the hardships and dangers of sea-life, to fill up the scanty roll of her able seamen? That is the problem France had to solve; and she has done everything to solve it,--but remove impossibilities.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.