The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-30 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, PRtDAY EVENING AUGEtTST-80, 1844.

that the whole is a pure intention ; but then,
if a Foreign Secretary, were once to open the
practice of contradicting newspaper falsehoods, that
practice must in the end come to this, that he
must contradict every mis-statement put forward
to fish the foreign policy of the Government, which
would be the same thing as a daily publication of
the minutes and correspondence of the Foreign-office.
Unable, however, as we are to contradict directly
from authority the mischievous statement of the
Morning Post, we think that there can be little
difficulty in demonstrating its utter falsehood by the
indirect process. It is, in fact, in the very highest
degree improbable that the Earl of Aberdeen has
made any such communication as that reported by
the Morning Post, and if his Lordship has
made any such communication, it is per-
fectly impossible that the Morning Post can know
anything of the matter. It is in the very highest
degree improbable, that the British Minister should ,
demand that the Royal French Admiral be ordered
to evacuate a post of which he has merely taken a
military possession, and upon which Great Britain
or an ally of Great Britain, has no claim, and
which notoriously belongs to the empire with which
France is at war. France might as well have
insisted upon our abandonment of Hong-Kong or
Chusan. The permanent occupation of the island of
Mogadore may be the subject of future negotiation
should France insist upon it, or should Great Britain
care about it, and we confess that we think the one as
improbable as the other, but it is apparent that the
time for such negotiations is not yet arrived,
nor, as we fear, very near at hand. France and
Morocco are still unfortunately at war, and it is
one of the incidental rights of war to hold military
possessions of the fortresses and territories of the
enemy, unquestioned by third parties. As to the
demand of a provisional engagement to surrender the
island at the end of the war, such a demand would
seem to be an insult to the Government which has
already disclaimed any purpose of retaining the
dominions of the Emperor of Morocco—and at
all events the one engagement would not be of
more worth than the other ; we do not say this
as slighting the value of the first engagement, for
we have an implicit confidence in the integrity of the
present Government of France, which is in all re-
spects the opposite of the Cabinet that cheated us in
the affair of Algiers ; we say it merely to mark
the improbability that a second engagement
should be required specially relating to Moga-
dore. Next, admitting the wild hypothesis that
the Earl of Aberdeen has, in fact, made
the demand imputed to him, arises the question,
how was the Morning Post to know anything of
the matter ? The Morning Post, we presume, does
not claim to be in Lord Aberdeen's confidence,
and even supposing it to possess the key of M.
Guizot's bureau, there has not been time for
the news to make the journey back from Paris.
The whole is, then, as we have said before,
an utter falsehood, and no one who has ob •
served the effect of similar falsehoods upon the temper
of the French people will dispute that it is a most
mischievous falsehood. There is little hope, how-
ever, that any experience of the ill effect of such
practices will cause them to be discontinued. The
Duke of Wellington in his letters and dispatches
from the Peninsula between 1808 and 1813,
makes more frequent complaint of the gossip-
ing and not always accurate communications
of his officers to the London newspapers, than of
any other annoyance ; yet though the honour of the
British arms and the safety of every man of the Duke's
army were more or less compromised by the indul-
gence of this vicious habit, it continued to be indulged,
and will continue, we fear, to the end of time.
When, however, the peace of the world comes to be
perilled by newspaper gossipping and newspaper lies,
the subject assumes a very serious complexion.