The Sun.
London, England, 1844-09-13 00:00:00

41IW
-21111

LONDON, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1844.

The friends of peace cannot look with any satisfac-
tion to the present relations between England and
France. The Otaheite affair has been patched up
for the present, but neither country is pleased with
the result, and every one looks with anxiety to the
next intelligence from the Pacific. The Protestant
and Catholic missionaries never can agree, and one
party or the other must be expelled from the islands,
now under French protection. It is needless to say
which will be driven to the wall. The French have
possession of the settlement; they will of course side
with the Catholics ; and while the English mission-
aries remain there will be no peace. Never was
there a more unfortunate selection for a French co-
lony than Otaheite.
The disputes bet ween France and .11orocco are in
the same unsettled state. The bombardment of two
paltry towns will not bend the stubborn spirit of the
Moorish population, nor make the EMPEROR yield to
the demands, probably most exorbitant, of France.
But of these we have no knowledge. We have to
infer, however, that they are exorbitant, from the
facility with which the demands of Spain, a country
utterly helpless, have been ceded. They are much
larger than Spain could have expected ; and when
the power of France is known, we may safely come
to the conclusion that the ultimatum of the French
Cabinet is so outrageous, that the EMPEROR will
rather risk all than yield. What will be the result ?
The French forces must march next spring into the
interior, and occupy every town on the coast. BUGEAUD
and JOINVILLE mutt open a new campaign, destroy
English commerce, seize territory on the Straits of
Gibraltar, beard the garrison of that fortress, and
thereby excite alarm in England for her Mediter- I
ranean
*trade and her communications with India.
These are fearful, but they are very probable pros-
pects. If England throws obstructions in the way,
the Chambers, nay, the whole of France, would
make a fierce outcry
against her interference;
neither the KING nor the Cabinet could control the
national. movement ; they must be carried with the
tide, or swamped in the struggle. LOUIS PHILIPPE
has, by a very excusable wish to see his sons distin-
guished, though not' with his usual prudence,
roused a spirit for war; nearly the whole of
the population are prepared for it ; the young
generation who have not experienced the p
of EnglancP, wish for another contest, and, confiding
too muchlt.o the state of Ireland, believe that they
will be able to wipe out the defeats which they sus-
tained under the most powerful man that ever ruled
France. "Perfidious .Albion " will be the war-cry.
These are our firm convictions, even on the moss sober
and deliberate view of the present state of affairs. It
must have struck every reader of journals, that not
one public man in France justified the conduct of the
Government when it was believed that they would
pay any deference to the deliberations of the
English, Vitliinet; either on the dispute about
Otaheite ,or Morocco. Baron CHARLES Durue,
0 TO* Mild OttgesmAn, hitcl no reluctance

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to a contest with England. Count MOLE
said France could make no concessions to England
about the affair of " one PRITCH.ARD." The whole
Chamber seemed unanimous, and none could have said
what would have been the result had M. GUIZOT an-
nounced that he would express sincere regret for the
treatment of PRITCHARD, and grant him an indemnity
—conditions which the French Government now have
admitted to be just. When the bad passions of na-
tions are roused, the small still voice of wisdom is lost
in the turmoil. Louis PHILIPPE seems not aware of
this indubitable fact , and he is still less aware that
all the other nations of Europe regard France as a
great volcano in the centre 'of civilization, and are
prepared to guard themselves against every ex-
plosion.

We are sorry to observe that the apathy of Go-
vernment touching the improvements and extension
of our efficient navy, remains as unmoved as ever !
Neither the menacing aspect of that political tempest
which has so lately passed over without bursting upon
us, nor the übiquitous activity of France in display-
ing and exercising her naval resources in every quar-
ter of the globe, is sufficient to dissipate the official
napping of the heads of the Admiralty Department.
Never have we been more thorough converts to the
opinions of other men than we profess ourselves to be
to the doctrine laid down in the House of Commons
by Sir CHARLES NAPIER, touching the inevitable in-
fluence which years will be found, as a general rule,
to exercise on the mental as well as the physical
energies of even our best men in command. We are
convinced that a man may be a Lord of the Admiralty,
for instance, without finding any exemption from this
common fate. Nor is he more free than any less for-
tunately distinguished individual of his species from
the moral weakness of aged men-..t0 undervalue the
intelligence and powers of the present generation as
compared with those whereof they were the con-
temporaries, and remain the survivors. There is a
principle of movement stamped on almost all human
institutions, however, by some superior power, the
mint mark of which cannot be effaced even by the
magical " broad arrow" of the QUEEN'S servants.
Amongst these institutions, the science of naval tac-
tics, and therefore of naval armament, is certainly not
the least progressive. The naval marine of the
United States have long since and memorably demon-
strated the vast superiority of large frigates with
heavy metal and great length of hull, over small men-
of-war of superior rating, of more guns, but those of
inferior calibre, and of a proportionately shorter run
from stem to stern. In the disastrous war of 1812
14, the costly sacrifices which we were doomed to
experience of heroic intrepidity and heroic resolution,
of human life and national honour, in noble but fruit-
less efforts to contend against overwhelming material
superiority, are still to be deplored, except in so far as
they shall have taught us the salutary lesson that one of
our first duties in peace is precautionary preparation
for the contingency of wad. Ais very certain that in the
struggle of which we speak, the Guerriere was utterly
overmatched in weight of metal, tonnage, manning,
and every other element of efficiency by the United
States ship Constitution, which captured her; that
the Hornet was wholly unequal in the same essen-
tial elements to the Peacock, by which she was
taken ; that the Avon, which went down colours
flying, if we remember, and her crew cheering, sunk
by the fire of her antagonist, the Wasp, was little
more than an armed, but ill-found yacht, by the side
of the far bulkier and more powerfully armed Ame-
rican sloop ;—and so, of other casualties (for more,
alas ! there were) in that lamentable contest. We do
not pause here to balance this shameful account of
discomfitures (occasioned by mismanagement, arro-
gance, and folly, for which we always have thought
that the Board of Admiralty of those days, their Se-
cretary included, richly deserved to be impeached) by
dwelling on the brilliant successes that always at-
tended our flag wherever it was but fairly matched, or
even only " almost" fairly, against that of the United
States, as in the capture of the Chesapeake, Ame-
rican frigate, by the British frigate, the Shannon ;
of the sloop Argus by the sloop Pelican ; or of
the President so-called frigate, by H.M.S. En-
dymion. Far from wishing invidiously to recur to
these hostile conflicts between single ships of the two
nations, we particularly desire to recal the fact to the
attention of our readers, that our American antago-
nist was at that day, as in these, most honourably dis-
tinguished for his admirable seamanship, his. un-
doubted courage, his enterprising audacity, and the
admirable system upon which his navy was manned,
armed, and equipped. For it was with a full know-
ledge of all these facts that the Admiralty in 1812-14
allowed so many of our cruisers, under every con-
ceivable disparity of force and equipment, to encounter
the overwhelming superiority of their American an-
tagonists. The results of that imbecile and overween-
ing confidence, though they showed against what
hopeless chances British valour will always struggle
—sometimes reaping death and defeat from the very
temerity which at others enables her to pluck victory
out of the hands of Fate as it were—did not fail to
show that the omissions and errors of defective pre-
paration cannot be always repaired in time by the
bravest efforts of the bravest service in the world.
Now the Admiralty of 1844 will too surely follow in
the footsteps of their predecessors of 1812, if the
public voice do not immediately call them to a more
vigilant and vigorous discharge of their most respon-
sible duties.
What is the demonstration with which they are
prepared, to prove to Europe and the world at large,
that whilst on the one hand this country is neither so
wanting in self-respect, neither so diffident of her
strength, nor so prodigal of her means, as to com-
mission large fleets of her men-of-war for no other
purposes than those of making descents on obscure
coasts of remote seas, deposing olive-coloured princes,
or tearing down the newly-acquired flag of a semi-
civilized insular monarchy, in order to set upper own,
by fraud or violence, in its stead ; or enforcing de-
mands of apology and pecuniary reparation against the
barbarian SULTAN of dominions adjacent to those last
usurped by them in Africa ? The demonstration pro-
duced by the extenAve commissioning of so re-
spectable a naval squadron as' France has dispatched
against the forts and coasts of Morocco, and up the
Mediterranean, by- those detachments of powerful
ships of the lino, frigates, &c., which she has sent into
the seas of China, off the shores of South America,
and into the Pacific—by the coincident appearance,
in the Yellow Sea, of an American man-of•war
with this French force ;—by the display of a
formidable Russian navy, the ships of which are
appearing so often in the principal harbour and road-
steds of Europe and of Asia; and by the notorious
and admitted inferiority of the scale on which our
own navy is at present established, so far as regards
the number and the manning of our ships in com-
mission : this demonstration consists in—what? In
the increase of our Mediterranean fleet in some amount
less disproportionate to that of France than one or
two to 17 or 19 ? In the replacing at our principal
outports and naval harbours the customary protection
of formidable guardships, such as first-class men-of-
war, in a condition capable of a rapid completion of
equipment ? No, nothing of the kind. It consists in
the putting into commission some dozen of small gun-
brigs—about the most useless craft which could be

contributed for active service in the event of
war, or even as a squadron of observation in

the case of such further reckless displays on the

part of the French navy, as the bombardmen

of maritime towns belonging to a friendly Power.
These brigs, denounced by the most competent naval

authorities, are commissioned for the sake of entering
volunteer hands, and drafting them to other ships of
her MAJESTY'S navy, as they may be required. A

correspondent of our's has so recently and so ably de-
monstrated the futility of the expectations based on

this kind of craft (from the unwillingness, among
1 other causes, of men to engage themselves under con-
ditions that preclude them from knowing beforehand
anything of the officers they are to serve under), that
we do not enter again into that question. But we
ask, what can be the reason that, against the irrefraga.
ble evidence to the necessity, policy, and expediency
of increasing both the efficiency and the extent of our
navy, the Admiralty remain thus supine as to all
useful exertion ; thus mischievously meddling as to
the re-establishment of a foolish and ineffective de-
scription of vessels of war? Is it that Sir ROBERT
PEEL abets the twaddling unreadiness of Sir GEORGE
COCKBURN, in returning to the fatuity of the days of
little brigs and half and-half equipments, in order
that he, the Premier, may realise on the year's in-
come a taking "surplus ?" We are much disposed to
believe that this MU be the fact, There is a large