A FRENCH OFFICER ON ENGLAND’S NAVAL POWER.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 36, 10 January 1884, Page 3

A FRENCH OFFICER ON ENGLAND’S NAVAL POWER.

An article in the Rente des Deux Mondes, on “ Italy and the Levant,” written by an officer of the French Navy, says:—“ It appears that in the first rank of the opponents of our legitimate claims in the Levant we must place England, our constant rival. We believe that the real strength of England is much overestimated, and that we bow too easily before her haughty will through not examining too closely the disproportion that exists between her pretensions and the actual force with which she can back them. Never was there a better comparison than that of ‘ a Colossus with feet of clay ’ applied to this vast empire, of which it is said, more correctly than that of Charles V., that the sun never sets on it. Twenty cruisers of great fleetness thrown on the chief commercial routes of the world, and commanded by seamen resolved on war without quarter—the real war—would be sufficient, however, to strike England to the heart. Commercial monopoly, the very life of England, would be annihilated in a few months. Not one of the powerful colonies, on behalf of whom she has never waged a colonial war, would assist her with a single man or a guinea in a purely English quarrel, where their material interests, so distinct from hers, would not themselves be in peril. The Dominion of Canada, the free States of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand would quickly proclaim their independence and

their national autonomy. English statesmen know this well, and her naval officers know it better still. The question of the Alabama, whose very name sums up the commercial ruin of the United States, the rival then so justly feared by the merchants of England, was settled, not by right—for when has England ever cared for justice ?—but at the salutary dread which sne begins to feel at the constant irasfoimotions of other navies before the new conditions of naval warfaie, as day by day we sec more clearly that the essential factor, not of victory in pitched battles, but of the final success of the struggle belongs to speed and the übiquity which that assures, still more than to the power of cannons or the thickness of ironclads. The sailors know this, and are constantly raising the cry of alarm. ‘ Our great peril, if war overtakes uh, lies in the present state of our navy,’ This cry England hears, and comprehends its gloomy menace. She may double the number of her ironclads and fast cruisers, but she knows well they will be use-

less to save her commerce. War, however, will not overtake her. for she will draw back from war, whenever her commerce would be endangered on the bloody field of battle,”