France was now receiving greater punishment than she had anticipated, and even those members of the Cabinet and Deputies who were responsible for the sudden invasion of England were compelled to admit that they had made a false move. The frontiers were being ravaged, and although the territorial regiments remaining were considered sufficient to repel attack, yet the Army of the Saône had already been cut to pieces. In these circumstances, France, knowing the great peril she ran in prolonging the invasion of Britain, was desperately anxious to make the British sue for peace, so that she could turn her attention to events at home, and therefore, although in a measure contravening International Law, she had instructed her Admirals to bombard British seaports and partially-defended towns. Although the guns of the hostile fleet had wrought such appalling havoc on the Humber, on the Tyne, and along the coast of Kent and Sussex, nevertheless the enemy had only secured a qualified success. The cause of all the disasters that had befallen us, of the many catastrophes on land and sea, was due to the wretchedly inadequate state of our Navy, although the seven new battleships and six cruisers commenced in 1894 were now complete and afloat. Had we possessed an efficient Navy the enemy could never have approached our shores. We had not a sufficient number of ships to replace casualties. Years behind in nearly every essential point, Britain had failed to give her cruisers either speed or guns equal in strength to those of other nations. Our guns were the worst in the world, no fewer than 47 vessels still mounting 350 old muzzleloaders, weapons discarded by every other European Navy. For years it had been a race between the hare and the tortoise. We had remained in dreamy unconsciousness of danger, while other nations had quickly taken advantage of all the newly-discovered modes of destruction that make modern warfare so terrible. Notwithstanding the odds against us in nearly every particular, the British losses had been nothing as compared with those of the enemy. This spoke much for British pluck and pertinacity. With a force against them of treble their strength, British bluejackets had succeeded in sinking a number of the finest and most powerful ships of France and Russia. France had lost the _Amiral Duperré_, a magnificent steel vessel of eleven thousand tons; the _Neptune_ and _Redoutable_, a trifle smaller; the _Tonnerre_, the _Terrible_, the _Furieux_, the _Indomptable_, the _Caïman_, all armoured ships, had been lost; while the cruisers _D'Estaing_, _Sfax_, _Desaix_, _Cosamo_, _Faucon_, the despatch-vessel _Hirondelle_, the gunboats _Iberville_, _Gabes_, and _Lance_, and eleven others, together with sixteen torpedo boats and numbers of transports, had been either blown up, burned, or otherwise destroyed.