The Express.
London, England, 1863-08-05 00:00:00

LYCIGUM.

Tnra EvrArm, A SITDDiiA6T ICR. Mesas. Shore and
Wid.lleorub Saw Ilearade and Mra Lee.—And TDB DOl6B
11141111,. Priam Frehter, ,hore. Jurdan, Brougham. and
Raymond ; Ilimas C. Leclercq, K. Terry, and Elaworthy.

BRITANNIA.
TSB Errsinn, THE GREST GHOST SCENE from THE
SPIRITS OF THE DEPARTED. —IHE &WHIZ ROAD TRIES
THE METTLE Mr. J. Reynolds and Miss S. Mlles.—Mears.
Woodman and Randall. —And HANDSOME JACK.

111011 WATIM AT LONDUA HAMM.

T 1316 O T %Inning. 5, 66+s . ..Ahinseea. 6b.
r -iroaaow—Morotsg. 6h. Wm.. .Atteraoaa. Th. VS.

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6.

A FRENCH army is pursuing its civilizing =lesion
in Mexico after the approved system and tradi•
Lions of the First and Second Empire. General
FORE; who has just been relieved of the command
of the troops, after buying up the resistance of
Puebla and making what in the language of the
turf is called a " walk over" the defences of the
capital, comes home to reap the honours of the
highest military rank and the especial favour of
his Sovereign ; but not before he has displayed,
in the character of a magnanimous invader, those
peculiar qualities which marked him, some twelve
years since, for one of the leading agents in the
suppression of law and liberty in his own country.
It seems more consistent with the fitness of things
that the men who sold their swords to the interests
of a violent usurpation at home should be reserved
for Mexican plunder and glory, rather than for
honourable deaths in European battle-fields ; and
in this respect there is perhaps more congruity in the
rising fortunes of FOREY than in the atoning fate of
• ST. ARNAUD and an &NEARS& From the cradle
of the Second Empire has sprung a race of officers
steeped in the Napoleonic jargon to the very lips,
and trained to treat one man's will as supreme ;
accustomed to force as the only Law, and to fraud as
the only principle of national organization. With
such men the Mexican invasion is a work after
their own hearts, a combination of cunning and
rapacity, disguised in the ready rhetoric of pom-
pous proclamations and decrees.
General Foam.- is certainly a master in this line.
His magnificent euphuism, his powerful imaginative
faculty applied to the simplest facts, do credit even
to the columns of the Moniteur. But the system is
the same in Paris and in Mexico, and so are the for-
mulas. The enemy's troops are buried in flowers
as they march through the streets of the captured
cities, and the enthusiasm of the conquered Mexi-
cans for the French Zonaves is as rapturous as that
of the Parisian population for the returning army of
Italy. Only a small and incorrigible faction it is
that presumes to resist the foreign troops, who
come, like the Coalition in 1792 and the Alliance
in 1815, to restore liberty, order, and religion to
a misguided nation. It is as the liberator of all
oppressed peoples that the Emperor of the FRENCH,
through General FOREY, is resolved to save the
Mexicans from their own mistaken independence,
and to transform their national life, by seizing
their treasury, impounding their revenues, fasten-
ing upon their mines, and confiscating, after the'
manner of the Russian authorities in Poland, the
estates of every Mexican who prefers uncultivated
freedom to such civilization as French bayonets
import. Nor is General FORZY leas proficient in
the discovery and organization of the " national
" will " of the Mexican people, whose rights and
interests he comes to protect. So anxious is he
to lose no time in divesting himself of the charac-
ter of a mere military conqueror, and to hand
over the government of the country to its legiti-
mate possessors, that he proceeds at once to nomi-
nate a select junta, and to appoint a select
assembly of notables, and out of these two
select creations to construct a provisional
triumvirate, of whom one is an Archbishop
who, being on his travels, suddenly finds himself
famous as he is breakfasting one morning at St.
Cloud ; and another is that General Amours, the
exiled rebel and conspirator, who, after endeavour-
ing to dispose of his country to the highest royal
or imperial bidder, has carried back his treason to
his native shores in the rear of a hostile army, and
now accepts office as the bailiff of the French occu-
pation.

- We do not envy our contemporaries over the
water, who in one column are denouncing the
atrocities of a Motraavurr, and in another register-
ing the decree* of a Four ; who are recording
the violation of a republican nationality by the
descendants of the volunteers who vindicated the in-
dependence of the French Republic, and the spolia-
tion of a rich but weak country by the lons of the
men who saved the soil of France. It is one thing
to share in spirit the perils and victories of our
soldiers in whatever enterprise engaged, and
another to sacrifice immortal principles to the Wis.
faction of a cruel national vanity. Such, how-
ever, is the morality which the Second Empire
profanes and propagates. To the credit of the
better part of France let it be recorded that liberal
journals—even those which represent the military
propsgande of the Revolution--repudiate a policy
which, in the name of liberty and nationality,
suppresses a nation ; in the name of order °cons-
ents* the property of patriots ; and in the name of
" intervention"executes a conquest ; which appoints
a junta of traitors and an assembly of bribed and
intimidated agents, and calls their treachery or
weakness the will of a nation ; which has so singular
a sense of French honour as to quarter 15,000
troops upon a defenceless people, and then pretend
that they are mercenaries in the pay of the con-
quered; which, in its extreme moderation, while
it confiscates private estates and seizes the Custom,
expresses a desire that the principle of liberty of
worship may be established by the government of
its own selection, which is presided over by a fana-
tical ultramontane Archbishop hot from Rome.
All these miserable developments of the first
false pretences from which the French Mexican ex-
pedition, like the French Roman expedition, set
out, might well be only food for mirth, if not for
selfish satisfaction, to us as Englishmen, if se
Englishmen we could look to our own convenience
and reputation exclusively without regard to the
moral consequences of a policy of shameless wrong
on the part of such a mighty instrument of good
and evil in the world as the Government of

France. Undoubtedly so far as any political or
commercial interests of England are concerned we
are very far from havine any cause to be jealous
of any conceivable desigis of the French Marmon
upon Mexico. Questiois of principle apart, we
might well contemplate with amused complacency
the difficulties which our powerful neighbour has
deliberately cut out for himself, what with his con-
fused ideas of the Latin race, his calculations of the
unexhausted value of silver mines, and the specu-
lations of his nearest friends in bonds of very
doubtful origin and security. At the same time
we may be excused for an imperfect sympathy
with those shortsighted and selfish abettors of the
French expedition who begin to find that
their interests are not the first to be consulted by
the chiefs of a foreign army. But it is neither the
character of the Second Empire nor the selfish
blindness of speculators that we care for ; it is
the honour of the great and noble people of France,
which cannot be violated in Mexico without in-
jury to every liberal cause in Europe ; it is the
honour of the great French people we are jealous
for on behalf of Liberal Europe. And we would
ask any liberal Frenchman what there is in the
latest aspects of this " intervention " in Mexico,
as Marshal FOREY characteristically defines it, but
the desperate design of a few unscrupulous and in-
fluential men in Paris, regardless of the mute of
French blood, French treasure, and French
honour, and of the incalculable dangers and com-
plexities which European intervention in the New
World inevitably involves, to exploiter Mexico
now that Europe is impossible, or used up

The general correspondence from Rio, published
yesterday in most of the morning newspapers, con-
tained a statement implying that Earl Russell bad
given a promise to the Brazilian government that
Mr. Christie should not return to Rio as minister of
this country. This is, of course, an error. The
British government, it is well known, has approved
the conduct of Mr. Christie, and has made no con-
cession inconsistent with that judgment.

ght court.

OSBORNE, Avo 4.

The Queen drove out yesterday, awompanied by
Princess Helena and Princess Beatrice. The Hon. sr&
Bruce and Lieutenant-Celooel Du Platt were in etas.
dance.
Princess Louise rode on horseback.

The Prince of Wales, attended by Lientenant-General
Koollys ■d Major Terrisle, arrived at Marlborough-
home at tea minutes to ten o'clock List evening from
Halifax.

Viscount sod Viscountess Palmerston arrived in town
yesterday from Brookett Hall,