of the shares in the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company to aliens does not vitiate the British registry of the White Star steamers. In point of fact, although a foreigner cannot register as the individual owner or part owner of a British vessel, he can acquire all the shares of a joint-stock company registered as the owner of such a vessel and domiciled, as to its place of business, in this country. It is surely a fantastic abuse of legislation that one statute should furnish the means of evading the provisions of another statute affecting the greatest industry of the British Empire-that on which its sea-power and commercial supremacy depend. The North Atlantic problem is of the foremost importance in shipping because, from the beginning of steam navigation, the best efforts of naval architecture and marine engineering have been devoted to the task of linking the Old and the New Worlds. Hardly anything in marine engineering or naval architecture exists which is not in some degree due to successes on the broad Atlantic. We have lost, for a time, the 'blue ribbon of the Atlantic' to the Germans. We have also seen the larger part of our Atlantic fleet pass into the control of an alien interest which may some day be antagonistic; and we have had presented to us dismal visions of the complete loss of our prestige at sea. The new government agreement with the Cunard Company is designed to restore to us the blue ribbon. It is supported on the ground that, at any cost, Britain's supremacy in point of speed on the Atlantic must be maintained. It is true that fast vessels may lose money; and, if we want high-speed merchant cruisers, we must pay for them. The effect of the agreement is to constitute a partnership for national or imperial purposes between the British Government and the Cunard Company. No foreigners are to be allowed on the board of directors or on the list of shareholders or among the principal officers; and the directors may compel the transfer of any shares in which they have reason to believe that foreigners have any interest or control. A share is assigned to nominees of the Government, carrying a controlling vote on matters affecting the national relations of the company. In effect, the company, being aided by the advance of state money, is held bound to remain absolutely and entirely British with all its fleet at the command of the Admiralty. In return for this national aid it must produce and maintain a couple of steamers, not merely to regain the blue ribbon of the Atlantic, but able to outsail, and therefore to overtake, the fastest merchant steamers now afloat capable of being turned into cruisers by any foreign Power. The arrangement is something more than a reply to the American 'combine.' It is an intimation to all the world that the British mercantile marine is a national heritage which, in case of need, will be guarded by the national arm, even in time of peace, not on economic, but on political grounds. While the Cunard agreement is a commendable one in the circumstances, although it is not difficult to pick holes in it, one finds nothing to commend in the agreement made by the Admiralty and the Board of Trade with the International Mercantile Marine Company. This is a foolish and feeble arrangement, which can only be ascribed to the Morganisation' of the Departments by a combine' of reckless finance and overreaching politicalism. We do not propose to dwell on this unwise and useless agreement, but we call attention to the opening clauses, which simply legalise, or officially sanction, what is a direct violation of the principles of the Merchant Shipping Act. The companies are already British companies in name, though not in fact; and the American shareholders have no desire that they shall be anything else, so long as they can retain the British registry of the steamers. They have no desire or intention to transfer the ships to a foreign registry, because they can be sailed most cheaply and efficiently under the British flag. The vessels cannot, in any case, be transferred to the American register without a special Act of Congress-which there is now no hope of getting, whatever may have been anticipated when the combination was begun-because the vessels are foreign-built. But observe that these foreign-owned vessels under the British flag are obtaining the assistance of the British Government, by means of Admiralty subventions, to enable them to compete with unsubsidised British vessels, not only on the Atlantic, but also in any portion of the coasting and intra-imperial trade in which they may choose to embark. The Admiralty subventions will terminate in a year or two; but meanwhile the arrange ment is a monstrous one. It has been customary to associate the enormous development of the mercantile marine of Great Britain with the repeal of the old navigation laws. The development certainly followed that repeal, and has been more or less continuous to the present time; but there have been other causes. So long as timber was the only material for the construction of ocean carriers, America had the advantage over us as a shipbuilder, notwithstanding the lower cost of equipment in this country and the superiority of English oak for distant voyages. But with the advent of iron we became the shipbuilder, not only for our own growing and pushing shipowners, but for all countries, while America sank into a subordinate place from which she is now endeavouring to emerge. Opinions may differ as to whether our maritime progress could have been so great as it has been were the restrictions of the old laws maintained; but the repeal of the laws did not create the change. No one now, perhaps, regrets the abolition of these laws; but it may be well to consider whether, in order to preserve the supremacy we have obtained, we should not debar the coasting trade of the Empire to all non-reciprocating carriers, even though at present such nations take but a small share of that trade. The issue does not become the less impressive with the prospect of Canada becoming the largest shipbuilder in the world, as her resources and industries develope. The preservation of our shipping is a national necessity and therefore a political duty. Art. II.-THE ART OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 1. Jean Goujon: his life and work. By Reginald Lister London: Duckworth, 1903. 2. Le Primatice. By L. Dimier. Paris: Leroux, 1900. 3. French Painting in the Sixteenth Century. By L. Dimier. London: Duckworth, 1904. 4. Women and Men of the French Renaissance. By Edith Sichel. Westminster: Constable, 1901. 5. Les du Cerceau. Par le Baron Henri de Geymüller. Paris Librairie de l'Art, 1887. 6. La Renaissance en France. Par Léon Palustre. Three vols. Paris, 1879-1885. 7. Les Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi. Par le Marquis Léon de Laborde. Paris: T. Baur, 1877, 1880. And other works. THE sixteenth century is perhaps the most attractive period in the whole of French history; and a complete account of the art of the French Renaissance might naturally be looked for from French historians. Much excellent work has indeed been done by archæologists since the middle of the last century; but, as one of the ablest and latest of French writers remarks, the history of this period has yet to be written. Its study is in fact attended by peculiar difficulties. There are lamentable gaps in the evidence. France has suffered from wanton destruction far more than England. With the exception of Nonesuch, and a few other mansions that can be counted on one's fingers, nearly all our great historical houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have survived to the present day; but in France probably half of the finest examples have either disappeared altogether, or have sunk to base uses which, more or less completely, obscure their original purpose. The chief architectural effort of the Renaissance in France was concentrated on house-building; and great houses, as belonging to the privileged classes, were the first to suffer from the French revolutionaries. What is far less intelligible, however, is the callous indifference shown by the French aristocracy themselves long before the Revolution. They do not appear to have attached the slightest importance to their hereditary dwellingVol. 199.-No. 398. 2 B places. It was not merely that they pulled them down or 'cut them about' to make way for modern improvements, but that they were strangely ready to sacrifice any one of them that showed a reasonable prospect of conversion into cash. A prince of the great house of Condé destroyed, in 1799, the Château of Fère en Tardenois, probably an early work of Bullant. In 1780-82 the same nobleman had the entrance to Écouen pulled down, and sold the Château de Creil for old materials in order to save the cost of maintenance. So early as 1719 the Regent ordered the destruction of the Chapel of the Valois as the cheapest way of finishing it off. The demolition of the Château de St Maur, one of de l'Orme's principal works, was also due to the Condé family; and, though the Château de Madrid was in fact destroyed during the French Revolution, Louis XVI had actually ordered the sale of it for old materials in 1778, together with the Châteaux of Blois, Vincennes, and La Muette. Another cause that contributed to the ruin of many of these palaces was the curious improvidence of the royal builders. They seemed to build for the sake of building, without care either for completion or maintenance. Francis I ordered a palace, or a hunting-box on a scarcely inferior scale, wherever his fancy took him, but he seems to have lost his interest in the building before the roof was on; and du Cerceau remarks that his buildings were often left to perish for want of a slater to patch the roofs. Catherine de Médicis was possessed by the same mania for building on an impossible scale. The Chapel of the Valois, in some ways the most monumental effort of French architecture of the sixteenth century, was never completed. After barely starting the Tuileries, she dashed off into the costly undertaking of the Hôtel de Soissons; but neither building was finished when she died. The Tuileries was destroyed by the Commune; and the only vestige of the Hôtel de Soissons is Jean Bullant's forlorn looking column attached to the wall of the Halle aux Blés. After Catherine's death there was a lull for a time. The work that followed in the first half of the seventeenth century was admirable in quality, rather than abundant in quantity. France was holding its breath for the colossal enterprise of Louis XIV. If the country |