Now for French African colonization. If we have not been very wise ourselves, our neighbors, who have never been eminently happy in their attempts at colonization, have been much less so. They have been in possession of an immense territory in Algeria for twenty years, and have now about fifty thousand colonists there, with an army which has generally not been less than one hundred thousand, so that every colonist requires two soldiers to keep his throat from being cut, and his property from being robbed or stolen. This is about ten times the regular army that protects twenty-eight millions of Anglo-Americans from nearly all the savages of North America. The local revenue of Algeria is half a million sterling; but the annual cost of the experiment to France amounts to eight times as much as the revenue; and it has been computed that the whole charge to the French nation, from first to last (it goes on at the same rate), has been sixty million pounds. This is without exception the most monstrous attempt at colonization that has ever been made by man. If war should unfortunately arise with any maritime power, the matter will be still worse. At least one hundred thousand of the flower of the French army will then be worse than lost to France. For, pent up as it will be in a narrow strip of eighty miles broad along the shore of the Mediterranean, it may be blockaded from the sea by any superior naval power; and assuredly will be so, from the side of the desert, by a native one. To hold Algeria is to cripple France. What, then, is the cause of the fatality which has thus ever attended African colonization by Europeans? In tropical Africa, the heat and insalubrity, and consequently the total unfitness for European life, are causes quite sufficient to account for the failure; and the failure has been eminent with French, Dutch, English, and Danes. But this will not account for want of success in temperate Africa, whether beyond the northern or southern tropic. The climate of this last, especially, is very good; and that of the first being nearly the same as their own, ought not to be hurtful to the constitutions of southern Europeans.