urg 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.

* * * * *

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 s