The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-08-13 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, AUG. 13, 1844.

The time has been when an insult, so violent and
gross as that which has lately been committed by
the French authorities (?) in Tahiti, would have ex-
cited a storm of indignant feeling throughout the
British nation. Here and there perhaps, hiding
from the light in obscure holes and corners, the
jaundiced visage of some place-expelled Whig, or
rabid Radical, might have been found, by the cu-
rious, puckering itself into a grin of satisfaction at
the announcement of England's attempted dishonour;
but the prompt and loud call of the mass of the
people, still sound at heart, amid all their divisions
of party, would have been for immediate reparation
for the offence, or preparation, on the part of
their rulers, to wipe out, with their own hands, the
stain which has been inflicted upon the national
flag.

There may be many con current reasons urged for the
fact,—an undeniable one,—that no such amount of
indignation has been displayed on the occasion of
this affair of Tahiti; that, indeed, it scarcely seems
to have disturbed our digestion or our temper.
There is something, in the outrage itself and in the
entire proceedings of Messieurs Brouat, d'Aubigny,
and their confreres, so much resembling the fantastic
doings of a mob of emancipated apes or drunken
schoolboys—something so contemptible and cow-
ardly, and, at the same time, so preposterously
outrageous—that it is difficult seriously to bring
oneself to the conclusion, that it can he treated
otherwise by the French government than by a
public whipping bestowed upon the offenders, or
that by any chance it can give rise to a national em-
broilment. The circumstance, too, that the pro-
ceedings in question took place before the formal
reprobation, by the French government, of former
aggressions, could be known in Tahiti, contributes
greatly to take from them the complexion of national
proceedings, or such as we can as a nation resent ;
whilst the known good understanding existing be-
tween the cabinets of the Tuilleries and of Downing-
street is another and a material ingredient in allaying
any apprehensions, which we might otherwise have
entertained, of difficulty in the settlement of a
matter, which requires only the exercise of common
sense and candour on the one hand, and of firm-
ness, unmingled with passion, on the other.
Overlaying all these causes, however, of the pre-
sent unexcited state of the public mind, is a feeling,
and a just feeling, of confidence on the part of the
people that with a government such as the present,
whose foreign policy at least has been generally un-
exceptionable, whatever we may think of its do-
mestic policy, we are as far removed from the
chance of any serious impeachment of the national
honour being submitted to, as we are of the peace
of the world being jeopardized by any uncalled-for
display of frowardness or absurd jealousy, towards
foreign powers. We have no tricky plotter of
French isolation in the present cabinet—no inditer
of exasperating protocols, or contriver of national
dilemmas ;—but in their stead a statesman at the
bead o' our foreign affairs who, relying upon the
strength of England's recognized position amongst
nations, does not feel it necessary to fume and fret
and bully, on every occasion of fancied slight, as if
that position was one from which there was any se•
riously entertained fear of her sliding, but prefers
to keep firmly the even tenor of his way, neither
driven, from what he deems his country's interests,
by the menacing strength of some, nor tempted to
press those interests unduly, by the weakness of
other powers. In this confidence the public mind
rests. We sleep upon our knowledge of our coun-
try's gigantic power to act when the emergency
shall arise, and our conviction that we shall not he
so called upon, by any omission of vigilance on the
part of the men who hold in their keeping the na-
tional honour or the national safety.
We are not sure, however, whether this feeling
of fancied security may not be indulged in too far.
Apart from the evidence afforded by this affair of
Tahiti, which, notwithstanding the mad absurdity
which characterises it, is still an insult, and as
such must be atoned for, there is something in the
position of the French empire, at home and abroad,
and the temper of a portion of its people at this mo-
ment, which invites us seriously to watch that not a
point of our own position should be left unguarded,
or a bulwark, the weakest, of its strength be per-
mitted to be impaired. For a time the deserts and
arid plains of Algeria, and the Arab and the Moorish
scimetar, may suffice to draw off the hot blood of
" La Jeune France ;" for a time, which the hand
of death, by sweeping from her throne a sovereign
already far advanced in years, may at any moment
terminate. Upon the continuance of the sagacious
sway of Louis Philippe rests much of the hope to be
entertained of the pacific posture of that unquiet and
fickle people; and our own position to withstand
the torrent of long pent-up ambition, which may be
let loose by the termination of that sway, depends
too much upon our present politic care and watch-
fulness, to permit us for a moment to relax our ef-
forts for securing and deepening its foundations.
We must permit no more occupations such as this
of Tahiti, whether made under the insidious pretence
of a " protectorate" or in a bolder and more open
form. We must permit no more African encroach-
ments, and especially we must keep our eye upon
the proceedings of France towards Morocco. Above
all, we must be prepared to put down any insolence
which, under the prompting of an insane and pre-
sumptuous vanity, may be perpetrated by the unruly
boy-admiral, the Prince de Joinville, who now, with
a force so far greater than the amount of his pru-
dence to wield it, traverses the seas. France must
be taught in time, by the firm remonstrances of
England, and, if necessary, by demonstrations of
her determination to insist upon their fulfilment, to
keep within her boundaries, and to abstain from
that mad knight-errantry which sends forth her
fleets to found settlements in deserts, or upon barren
rocks in the Pacific, and to pick quarrels with help-
less women. We must not lull ourselves to ac-
quiescence by the thought that, because such ill-
guided efforts are only ruinously costly to France
herself, they are therefore innocuous ; but remem-
ber that the uncontrolled pursuit of those efforts
serve rather as safety valves to keep in present exer-
cise the sinews of her ambition, and to nurture a
race of those wild and daring spirits, with which, in
days past, she has worked out her daring plans, and