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.