"The French nation, however, deeming it unsafe to rest on any such frail contingency as voluntary enlistment, has wisely, as well as justly, decreed that her maritime districts and commercial marine shall be subject to the _same obligation_ to serve their country as the other classes of the community; and, accordingly, by the laws of France, every boy who goes to sea is required to register his name on the 'Inscription Marine.' After one year's probation, he enters into the class of 'Mousses' until he is sixteen, when he becomes a 'novice' or apprentice till eighteen, when he is classed as a marine or seaman, and _he is thenceforward at the service of the state till he is fifty years of age_. Besides this, about 1/20 of the general conscription throughout the inland provinces are by law liable to serve in the navy. By the above arrangements, it appears that between the year 1835 and 1844, both inclusive, 55,517 seamen answered the calls of the annual _Levée permanente_, and, moreover, that very nearly _the whole_ of the French merchant seamen, amounting altogether to upwards of 100,000 men, must have passed successively through the royal navy. "Under this admirable system--which, while it flatters the passions, cultivates the mind, and comfortably provides for the sailor,--the French nation are prepared, by beat of drum, to march from their various quarters to their respective ships, _compagnies permanentes_ of well-trained gunner seamen; and thus, at a moment's warning, even in time of peace, to complete the manning of _sixteen sail of the line_."--SIR FRANCIS HEAD, 184, 185. It is no exaggeration, therefore, but the simple truth, to say, that France and Russia could, in ten days from the time that their respective ambassadors left London, appear with a fleet of _thirty ships of the line and forty frigates or war-steamers in the Channel_, with which they could with ease blockade the Thames, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, where not more, at the very utmost, than eight or ten line-of-battle ships, and ten or twelve war-steamers, most of them only half manned, could be collected to oppose them. We have no doubt the crews of this diminutive fleet would do their duty as nobly as they did at the Nile and Trafalgar; but we shudder at the thought of the national blindness and infatuation which would expose them, and with them the existence of England as an independent nation, to such fearful odds.