The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-17 00:00:00

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LONDON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1844.

We cannot at all comprehend the policy of LOUIS
PHILIPPE and M. GUIZOT. They wish to live in
peace with England—they profess that the great
objects of their government are the maintenance of
peace all over the world, while in almost every
quarter of the globe emissaries are sent forth to ex-
cite disturbance. The islands of the Pacific Ocean
are, at the present moment, in a state of the utmost
confusion, caused by the French. The whole Medi-
terranean coast of Africa is up in arms against
France, if we except Tunis. Egypt is in a state of the
utmost uncertainty. The old brave man has given up
the reins of government to his profligate son, who is sup-
ported by the French, and, in case of a war with
England and France, he would at once declare against
England. But these petty Powers on the African
coast are nothing in the scale. They are mere ad-
juncts to the relations between France and England.
The proceedings of the French in that quarter, how-
ever, show what is their intention. LOUIS PHILIPPE
is anxious to live at peace with England, yet
JOINVILLE, and BIIOUAT, and D'AUBIGNY, are
doing everything in their power to excite the
English people against the French. The
bombardment of Tangiers is a novel feature in a
period of peace, and it is the more remarkable that
it takes place when the Sovereign of Prance is about
to pay a friendly visit to the Queen of ENGLAND.
The polic7 of the French KING encourages the
opposition journals of France to excite the peo-
ple against England ; he is encouraging his
son to attack an ally of England; he is making
grot demonstrations along the Mediterranean

shore, all injurious to the trade and influence
of England ; yet his Government professes that their
only object is to preserve the peace of the world.
We are reluctant to express any unfavourable
opinion of Louis PHILIPPE, but at the same time we
must state that his present measures are likely to
bring on an universal war, and destroy all the glo-
ries of his peaceful reign.

The leading weekly organ of the Anti-Corn-law
League has an article entitled, " The League, and
its advisers," which will be found in another column
of The Sun of this day—wherein the Chronicle and
one or two other journals are taken to task for having
presumed to offer advice unsolicited to this great na-
tional confederacy, and represented it as being in a
declining state of health. " The League is not con-
vinced," says our weekly Contemporary, " by such
testimony as has been offered, of its own failing
strength and energy. We believe ourselves to he as
vigorous as ever, and moving onwards with firm and
steady pace to the accomplishment of our object." The
League is right. It is as vigorous as ever, and the great
principle which it espouses is as influential as ever, if
not more so. True, we have no more weekly Covent-
garden meetings, but the good spirit is still actively at
work ; and addresses, tracts, and lectures are every-
where contributing to enlighten the public mind.
Were the object which the League professes to have
in view a mere Utopian theory, like Mr. OWEN'S social
system, it might possibly, when once the novelty was
at an end, sink into insignificance; but the principles
which it advocates are practical and business-like, and
every way fitted to meet the exigencies of the day ; con-
sequently there is no more likelihood of its declining,
in public estimation, than there is of Sir R. PEEL be-
coming a member of Mr. O'CoNNELL's Repeal Associa-
tion, or of Sir J. GRAHAM holding ii his hand a private
letter of M. MAzznsfs, without a wish to open it. In
truth, the League is to all intents and purposes a national
confederacy. It gives expression to the one great
want of this unrivalled commercial country. It
walks side by side with the age, of whose wishes it is
the recognised interpreter; and is repudiated, and its
vast moral influence denied, by none /but the selfish,
ignorant, short-sighted partisans of monopoly—an
anti-national class, whose power is rapidly on the
decrease, and whose theories must ere long be
gathered to the extinct crotchets of other days. Already
has the League been acknowledged by a potent ad-
versary to be a " great fact," and never, whilst
England continues to be the first commercial country
in the world, can it cease to be otherwise. We
can scarcely imagine any concurrence of public
events but such as must tend to keep it steadily on
the increase, for it represents the principle of common
sense—a principle which from its very nature is as
indestructible as the air we breatbe—as the soul that
informs us. But it is objected to the League, for-
sooth, that it will not enlist under the banners of
Whiggery— will not accept of Lord Joins RUSSELL
as a Commander-in-Chief—but will pursue an inde-
pendent course of action, irrespective of Whig and
Tory parties ! And why should it not do so ? Why
should it allow either a RUSSELL or a PEEL to clap a
muzzle on its mouth—to dictate to it how it
shall vote—how far it shall go—what it shall
say, and what it shall not say, in Parliament ? Its great
excellence in the public eye is its independence—
its entire freedom of thought and action ; and were it

once to forfeit this by an injudicious submission to
either of the two contending political parties, from
that moment it would cease to be a Power in the
country. The duty of the League is so obvious that
it is impossible to misapprehend or misinterpret it. It
has nothing to do with Whigs or Tories, but is
bound to keep solely in view the great—the para-
mount question of free trade. To this momentous
consideration every other must be held subordinate ;
and that statesman—no matter to what party he
belongs—must be deemed most worthy of the support
of the League, who will do the most to emancipate
Commerce from the galling shackles with which she
has so long been manacled.

It is becoming a question of daily increasing in-
terest, " What limits do our Ministers intend to assign
to the uncertainty, the timidity, and the vexations of
their scheme of colonial government?" The very
genius of mismanagement appears to have established
itself in some of the bureaux in Downing-street—
Tama;na Innelliqhes untior the want of coloured free
labour. It is agreed, on all hands, that the only effi-
. . .

cient course which can be taken to relieve her- from
this condition of agricultural paralysis into which she
has fallen, owing to the almost entire withdrawal
from work of the emancipated black population, is
for the Crown to sanction and encourage the immi-
gration of labourers accustomed to tropical heats, and
exposure to the varieties of climate which these gene-
rate. Two plans for drafting such immigrant labour
into these islands are proposed to the Colonial-office ;
the one, by importing native coolies from Bengal ;
the other, by inviting free Africans from the British
settlement at Sierra Leone, or the countries in its
vicinity, on that part of the African coast. The
Colonial-office halted so long before it could bring
itself to approve either the one or the other of these
experiments, that the resident planters and owners in
our West India Islands were compelled warmly to
remonstrate on the unnecessary aggravation of their
sufferings which ensued from this postponement of a
remedy. The plea of difficulty in dealing with a
proposition of so much novelty, was answered by
reference to the fact of the successful issue of such a
system of coolie immigration in the Mauritius and in
Demerara. When, at length, permission to adopt it
in the case of Jamaica had been coldly and tardily
conceded, the permission was found to be clogged
with so many obstacles and restraints and vexations,
that it was almost useless to those for whose welfare

it was intended. With the fortune of every other
boon which Sir ROBERT PEEL'S Government has
ever granted, this, also—there is too much reason to
fear—will have been yielded too late. It has been so
ungraciously and so long withheld, that it has not
been productive, as yet, of anything like the degree
of alleviation which must have been experienced
from its earlier concession. But if Jamaica and
other of our West Indian possessions have reason to
complain of the supineness, or the wrongheadness of
the Colonial Department in one particular, some of
our new establishments in Australia, in the Pacific,
and in parts of the world somewhat less remote, have
equal grounds for considering themselves aggrieved,
by a course of action on the part of the Colonial
Alinister that is neither protective, nor conciliatory,
nor just; but that it is calculated, on the contrary,
to exhaust the energies of the colonies which it con-
trols, in unsupported efforts to consolidate their own
strength and resources ; and to involve them in un-
seemly squabbles with the Government of the mother
country. In this latter category we may include the
noble island of Ceylon, and the important islands of
New Zealand. Our present business is with the
latter.

In the whole history of our colonial settlements, we
know of none which has been treated by the present
Government—and, we must add, by its predecessors
—with more of neglect and apathy at one time,
more of disingenuousness and fatuity at another, than
New Zealand. Neither the Government of Lord
MELBOURNE, nor that of Sir ROBERT PEEL, seems
to have ever made up its mind to the policy which it
became this country to adopt towards these fine and
improvable islands. If other States—Holland, for
example—had been disposed to contest our possessory
title, British Administrations seem to have gone out
of their way to afford them means and opportunity
for doing so, by the indifference and indecision with
which, during a very long interval after the disco-
veries of Cooic, acting on the hints of TASMAN, they
regarded all propositions for settling and cultivating
these two islands of New Zealand. No jurist, we
apprehend, can feel any substantive difficulty about
the soundness of our preferable title to them; but
Lord JOHN RUSSELL himself always appeared as
disinclined to raise this preliminary question as Lord
STANLEY seems to be. Why, we are at a loss to di-
vine. If these Ministers have acted upon principles
of supposed
exposed expediency, they have been
egregiously deceived. Their forbearance has only
opened a door for the sub-negotiation, if we may so
call it, of French and other land speculators with
native chiefs who were already in immediate rela-
tions of amity with, and dependence upon, us. Had
we stated more broadly, from the first, our preten-
sions (which cannot be questioned, so long as all the
precedents are to enure, that are relied on, by European
nations for the right of territorial occupation in newly
discovered tracts of waste or savage country), there
would have been such an ascertained proprietary

principle established by the Government, as against
all incomers, as must have prevented those conflicting
claims in respect of lands, conceived to be already
ceded or transferred, by sale and purchase, to the New
Zealand Company, which resulted, the other day, in
the bloody conflict of Waken, and the death of Captain
WAKEFIELD and many other English settlers. It is
clear, from the circumstances of that disastrous ren-
contre, that the native chiefs had either never parted
with the lands they were required to surrender to the
parties who should purchase them of the New Zea-
land Company, or did not understand the delegated
title of a private corporation holding under the
Crown to which they themselves acknowledged a
willing allegiance. Now, instead of repairing this
anomalous and dangerous state of things, the Colonial
Department, and her MAJESTY'S Government in
general, seem pre-occupied by a taste for per-
forming the comedy of She Would and She
Would Not. They will not exercise that right
of sovereignty which consists in giving titles to
parcels of the soil set out for sale to British subjects ;
but they will not, on the other hand, repudiate the
fact of that sovereignty.
How grievously this feeble and injudicious waver-
ing must operate on the interests of the New Zealand
Society, was very forcibly demonstrated at a special
Court of the Proprietors, held yesterday, at their
house in Broad-street-buildings. The report read to
this meeting by the secretary contained the following
passage :—" We are prepared to issue orders for land
in any of the settlements, not doubting ourselves,
after the award of the tribunal to which the questions
between this Company and the Colonial-office were
referred, that you may safely rely on the justice of
her Majesty's Government and Parliament for ob-
taining, sooner or later, the grants from the Crown to
which the Committee of the House of Commons has
declared you to be entitled." We fear that this is a
begging of the question. What is the value of de-
clarations and recommendations of Committees of
inquiry appointed by the House of Commons, when
the Government, at pleasure, treats them in that
"manner so Tartarly," which is adopted in defiance
of the affirmative report on the Danish claims, for
example ? But that to talk thus is but to beg the
question is virtually admitted in the very next lines of
the report itself—" But, at the same time, the extreme
injustice which you have suffered in being encouraged
to subscribe a large capital, and to lay out more than
half a million of money, in colonisation, without having
yet obtained a secure title to one acre of the land
which the Crown engaged to grant to you in con-
sideration of your outlay for public purposes, teaches
us a caution which we are desirous of impressing
upon all who may apply to us for land orders. And
this, we believe, will be done most effectually by our
refusingito guarantee any other title than such as the
Company may obtain from the Crown ;"—when the
Crown is disposed, that is, to give such title to the
Company. Now, where is the evidence of the wish,
the contemplation, or the readiness of the Crown to
do so ? If the Company have vainly sought, hitherto,
to establish an equitable right to such a title,
by an expenditure of more than 500,0001., do they
expect to wring it from the moral or political con-
scientiousness of the Government hereafter, by de-
clining to go a step further in the same direction—a
direction so convenient and irresponsible to that Go-
vernment, so onerous and dangerous to the Com-
pany ? "We propose," the report proceeds, "to
attach to every land order a condition to the above
effect. In this way, every applicant will be made
fully to understand that on the question of the pro-
bable or certain justice of the Crown, in its dealings
with the Company, he judges for himself, and must
rely on his own judgment." How many "land
orders" the Company can expect to be applied for
by men who have that ominous presumption laid be-
fore them, of " the probable or certain justice of the
Crown," which the Crown's refusal to guarantee the
title to a single acre of their lands to a body which
has invested more than 500,0001. in the purchase of
them, we leave it to time to develope. But we would
counsel the Company to proceed for their just and
equitable demands by some more urgent and cogent
process than this passive, and hitherto most unlucky,
reliance on the " probable or certain justice of the
Crown."

The reported abdication of MEHEMET ALI 13 not
confirmed by the latest intelligence from Malta. it
was known there on the 4th inst. that he had sud-
denly left Alexandria on the 26th of July for Cairo
and a report prevailed that he had resigned the power
into the hands of his son, but no particulars are given,
and we are, therefore, inclined to doubt the news
brought by the French telegraph. The British
Consull:at Alexandria had dispatched a Maltese sail-
ing vessel to the senior naval officer at Beyrout, Cap-
tain GLASSCOCK, of the Tyne, to summon to
Alexandria every disposable British ship of
war. The PACHA'S officers of state, the diplo-
matic body, and public in general, are at a
loss to account for his sudden departure.
The Maltese Times attributes it to madness. " The
PACHA," it states, " the day before yesterday lost his
senses. Two nights running he had not had an hour's
sleep, and in the morning he ordered his coach to be
ready, saying, wish to go to Cairo.' He did this
without advising with any one ; but his sons soon dis-
covered it, and ran to stop him, demanding an expla-
nation of such a curious way of acting. Last night
he passed in company of MOHARREM BEY, without
sleeping one single hour, and this morning ordered
his boat to be ready to sail, saying, ' I do not wish to
hear or know anything concerning Egypt,' but
added, that IBRAHIM PACHA knew what he had to
do, having consigned to him the " Suggello," ' but
this he would not accept while his father lived. All
the consuls are in motion. It is said that MEHEMET
ALI explained himself by saying that it was his wish
to go to Mecca, and there die.' "

Accounts from Madrid of the 9th inst. state, that
intelligence had been received on the previous even-
ing from Gibraltar, announcing that the Emperor of
Morocco had acquiesced in all the demands of France
and Spain. it thus appears that all parties in that
quarter have been taken by surprise by the unexpected
and sudden bombardment of Tangiers. The next in-
telligence from Gibraltar will, therefore, be looked to
with much interest. The editor of the Eco del
Comercio, a Madrid journal, was tried on the Bth for
a libel on the Government, and acquitted by a jury of
his countrymen. This shows that some patriotism
still remains in that unfortunate country.

The Three per Cents. were done at 28 for cash,
and 281 at 60 days; and the Five per Cents. at 19
15-16 at 60 days.

The principal intelligence in the Paris papers has
been anticipated by the telegraphic dispatches pub-
lished yesterday. The bombardment of Tangiers
had caused much excitement, and depressed the funds
fully a quarter per cent. Every one looked forward
to a peaceable termination of the contest at the mo-
ment when the French Admiral was destroying the
fortifications, and we fear also the houses of innocent
foreign !'residents in [the chief Moorish town on the
Straits of Gibraltar. " Yesterday morning," says
the Revue de Paris, " the news from Morocco was
pacific. We knew that a courier had left the Foreign-
office with dispatches for the Duke DE GLIICKSDERG,
who is at this moment in Madrid. Those dispatches
contained the instructions and powers necessary to
ratify, in the name of the KING, the agreement con-
cluded by M. DE NION. Immediately on receipt of
those dispatches, M. DE GLUCKSBERG was to repair from
Madrid to Cadiz, where the steamer Gregeois, which
was ordered to wait for him, was to take him on board,
and convey him to Tangiers. Now the aspect of of-'
fairs has completely changed. Just as we were ready
to go to press, we hear that a telegraphic dispatch, re-
ceived in Paris too late to be published in the Mes-
sager, announces a fact of the highest importance.
According to that dispatch, the Prince DE JOINVILLE,
not deeming the propositions of peace acceptable, had
commenced the bombardment of Tangier, dismounted
80 pieces of artillery planted on the ramparts, and de-
stroyed the fortifications erected by the Moors on the
sea side."

The French Government were evidently prepared
for such a result. For, according to a letter in the
Semaphore of Marseilles, France has not had, since
the expedition against Algiers, in 1830, such a naval
force on the coast of Africa. " Before the 15th inst.,''
says a Correspondent of that journal, " France will
have on the coast of Barbary eight ships of the line
—one three-decker, the Suffren, commanded by the
Prince DE JOIN villa; and a crew of 900 men; the
Jemmapes, 917 men; and the Triton, 810, now be-