The Express.
London, England, 1849-05-10 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, MAYIO.

A FEW more experiments in the way of intervention
by constitutional governments will, we are confident,
create such a disgust of any policy which leads to it,
that the world will see intervention abolished by the
certainty of its inconvenience and failure, if not by
its manifest injustice. A despotic government has
at least this advantage—that, knowing its aim, it
marches straight towards it; knowing its friends it
does not disappoint them. Bat a government which
intervener, as France and England have done at titans,
to set up or protect a moderate and constitutional party
in any country, neither knows its aim nor the mode
of arriving at it, nor the friends it can aunt upon.
The French sent an army to Spain in 1823 to put
down the democratic Cortes, at the same time to restore
the king, but to oblige FERDINAND to give such gua-
rantees and liberties as would content a moderate party.
FERDINAND grasped the absolute power offered to him
at the point of 'lynch bayonets, and then spurned
every counsel of moderation. At a later penod we
embraced ISABELLA'S cause, and deemed the thorough
liberals the most efficient party to support her. All
know how she flung ns over, exiled the liberals,
and drove our ambassador out of the country. In
Portugal we lime intervened, and re-intervened, bat
never to attain what we sought.
The difficulties of intervening with any success in
favour of a moderate party, especially in countries too
passionate and ignorant to tolerate anything bat ex-
tremes, are great, when one power undertakes the
intervention. Bnt when two governments, calling
themselves allies bat necessarily rivals (at least their
diplomacies and officers of state), intervene together,
' then of course they quarrel. And ins'cad of bringing
peace, moderation, and support, they merely sow
discord, intolerance, and fresh feuds in a country
already overgrown with them.
The dissimulation of a mixed and doubtful political
state is added to all these difficulties and meannesses.
And the most philanthropic originators of interven-
h Con are thus obliged to use subterfuge and treachery,
' and to condescend to lies and miserable shifts, even
for the best and fairest of purposes.
The French government has thrown itself headlong
into one of those miry pits of intervention, where one
can neither swim, sink, nor extricate one's-self. Wedo
not believe the malign constructions put upon French
policy and French conduct. We cannot think that
M. BARROT, whatever his dread of red republicanism
in France, would take the trouble of sending 15,000
men merely to put down MARTINI and restore the
Pope. We acquit the French of acting in any such
absolutist sense, or in any such accord with the reac-
tionary spirit of Austria. Bat however excusable the
intentions of France, the conduct of the expedition,
and the results of that conduct, are evidently all, and
even more, than absolutism could desire.
First of all, the expedition itself was a mistake. It
has been for a long time urgently demanded ley the
Duo D'HABCOIJET, French ambassador to the rope,