We have been in possession of the southern promontory of Africa for above fifty years. In this time, besides its conquest twice over from a European power, and in addition to fleets and armies, it has cost us, in mere self-defence against savages, three million pounds, while at this moment we are engaged in the same kind of defence, with the tolerable certainty of incurring another million. No one will venture to say that this sum alone does not far exceed the value of the fee simple and sovereignty of the southern promontory of Africa. What we get from it consists chiefly in some purgative aloes, a little indifferent wool, and a good deal of execrable wine, on the importation of which we pay a virtual bounty! As for _our subjects_ in this part of the African continent, they amount to about two hundred thousand, and are composed of Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, Malays, Hottentots, Bushmen, Gaikas, Tambookies, Amagarkas, Zulas, and Amazulas, speaking a very Babel of African, Asiatic, and European tongues, perilous to delicate organic structures even to listen to.
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.