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 reestablishment 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 co