The Press.
London, England, 1855-10-27 00:00:00

OUR MANIA FOR MEDDLING.

Wtrry men of the world, as well as profound
philosophers, have often amused themselves
with contemplating the foibles of John Bull.
The collective character of the English nation,
and the peculiarities of
our race, bristle with
propensity of the ti
fall into a mania is,
than any other feature
meter. We are strangely

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delusions." The grave Dutch were once half-
crazed about tulips, but our political and com-
mercial bubbles have been far worse than
floricultural follies. We have had " The
" Young Pretender in the Warming-Psi,"
" South Sea Stock," " Wilkes and '45,' " th•
" Cock-lane Ghost," " Field Preachers," dow*.
to the follies of our own times, including the
frenzy of the fo,tal " 18.25," " St. John Levy,"
" Cold Water Cure," " Teetotalism," " Railway
Shares," and " Spirit-Rapping." But the cata-
logue has too much sarcastic eloquence of its
own for us to enumerate the particulars, which
touch us too poignantly.
Of all the manias to which our English
society is subject, the rage for meddling with
the affairs of small communities is of the
most singular kind. A petty territory—whose
name is probably omitted by some of the
gazetteers, and whose frontiers have the same
proportions to European demarcations as the
borders of a Kidderminster carpet to the
boundaries of England—cannot go right unless
its internal affairs be supervised and regulated
from our too famous " F. 0." in Parliament-street.
We must conquer Brobdignag, and we must
also dwarf our minds to the backstair -in.
trigues of each atom of the Lilliputian Confe-
deration. The late Doctor CHALMERS told us
a few years ago that we were living in " an age
"of little men and little measures. The squab
Ming policy of Lord PALMERSTON realises that
description. Our Premier personifies our
mania for meddling.
And it is time for us to bestir ourselves,
unless we desire to become thoroughly ridicu-
lous to the whole world. Our diplomacy,
under Lord PALmEasTon's auspices, is becom-
ing purely ludicrous. Its cumbrous machinery
is applied to the arrangement of trifles beneath
contempt. Village scandals are exaggerated
into diplomatic questions of momentous im-
portance. Somebody, in some place, pulls
another body's nose, and their respective na-
tions must have recourse to protocols. The
most contemptible squabbles are brought
before the Cabinet of the British Empire.
Under no other Prime Minister was there so
much personal acrimony, such envenomed
littleness, such constant spleen about trifles,
RS under Lord PALMERSTON. He was once
called the " Captain Rock of Europe," and the
unmeaning lawlessness of agrarian outrage is
not inaptly imitated in the desultory fierceness
and blustering arrogance of our Prime Minis-
ter's mode of regulating foreign affairs.
There is scarcely a country in the world
where we are not now involved in a diplomatic
entanglement about some ridiculous trifle,
entirely beneath the statesmanship of a great
empire. In Greece a Minister insists upon
introducing to the Court a lady of doubtful
reputation. The Queen resists; then comes a
Ministerial crisis, and all our diplomacy is set
at work. Could anything be more ridiculous
than our interference in such petty Court
scandals at the other end of Europe ? If
Mayfair was gossiping for a week about the
tattle of the Orkneys or the Hebrides, or if
the Secretary for the Home Department were
called on to act in a case of female small-talk
about what Mrs. Honour said of Mrs. Abigail
and John Thomas, we should all laugh. But
our attempt to arrange all matters in the case
of the alleged " black sheep," at the Court of
Greece, is equally absurd.
At Tuscany, the matter is almost more
ridiculous. A squabble about an attache of
the Sardinian Legation is magnified into a
mighty affair, as if it were as serious as some of
the causes of quarrel between CHARLES V. and
FRANCIS 1. And then, crossing the Atlantic,
we find that our Foreign office busybodies are
all in a fidget on account of some despicable
filibustering expedition. The steam is to be
got up to an Armada-panic temperature. Im-
mense events are looming in the distance,
when, lo two or three suspicious-looking
craft are seen hull-down in the horizon ; our
West Indian fleet gives chase, " England
expects that every —" little middy should
have a laugh at the blunders of the big-wigs
and the farce ends—not in another Trafalgar,
but after the plan of battle in the Critic:—
",The Yankee fleet I cannot see, because 'tie
" not in sight !"
We will certainly back Lord PALMERWON
against any public character in the world for