ART. X.-1. Reflections on the Domestic and Foreign Policy of Great Britain since the War. By a British Merchant. 1833. 2. Letter to Viscount Palmerston respecting the Relations of England and Portugal. By William Walton. 1830. 3. A Second Letter to Lord Palmerston. By William Walton. 1831. 4. A Reply to the Exposé des Droits de S. M. Donna Maria. 1832. 5. Portugal; or, Who is the lawful Successor to the Throne? By a Well-wisher to the peace and independence of both Portugal and Brazil. 1831. WHEN one's own house is on fire, there is neither time nor inclination to think of the scandals and squabbles of the neighbourhood. The unhappy sufferers whose lives and property are in jeopardy, the few brave and active men who are endeavouring to check the conflagration, and the greedy crowd who are on the watch for plunder, are all too much absorbed by the urgent excitement of the moment to think of anything else: present inconveniences are unfelt-personal injuries are disregarded-petty thefts are committed with impunity-and as to remote events and future interests, they are no more thought of than the millennium. Such is, and for the last two years has been, the state of England with regard to her foreign policy. We are not so Quixotic as to hope to be able to create a different feeling; indeed, we ourselves partake too much of the general anxiety, and are too much convinced that our first and greatest danger is at home, to wish to distract the public attention from perils that are urgent and immediate to those which are eventual, and perhaps problematical: but when our external difficulties, by their number, their frequency, their magnitude, come so near and assume so fearful an aspect as to bear directly on our internal concerns, it becomes a duty-even at the risk of being, like the patriot prophetess of Troy, disregarded-to warn our fellowcitizens that, in addition to our domestic enemies, we are beset by foreign dangers; and that our worst antagonists are not our open adversaries, but the treacherous Sinons whom we have admitted into our city and our councils. If some uavris xaxwv had prophesied to our fathers, they would not have believed-and when impartial history shall have told our children, they will not comprehend the state to which our foreign relations have been brought. We shall beg leave to lay before our readers a summary of some of the chief points of that miserable, degraded, and degrading policy. 1. Holland. I. Holland. We have allied ourselves with our natural* enemy, France, against our natural ally, Holland-we have frustrated the diplomacy and forfeited the conquests of our ancestors. We have effected the opening of the Scheldt +-we have introduced a French army into the Low Countries, and consolidated by military co-operation and family alliances the influence of France over those provinces whose independence of that power was, for a century and a half, the first object of our national policy—we have adopted Bonaparte's arbitrary and illegal principles of proclaiming blockades and embargoes, not for any immediate military purpose, but to operate, by their pressure on commerce, remote political consequences principles which even in war were untenable, but in peace are monstrous; and which will hereafter recoil, fatally perhaps, on our own maritime rights. We have dislocated all the interests-we have prostrated all the barriers—we have broken all the treaties which it had cost us oceans of blood and mines of treasure to establish; and every power in Europe whose aid we had courted, purchased, and employed to restrain the ambition of France, has been affronted, insulted, or sacrificed-in favour and for the support of that our most ancient and formidable enemy-our now still more formidable ally! II. Algiers.-Nor have we been satisfied with the folly and humiliation of helping to establish the power of France in the Ne * We use this word in its popular sense, to express that combination of circumstances such as geographical position, difference of religion, manners, tempers, and interests-which tend to make nations rivals and enemies; and, certainly, if there ever were two countries, whom the evidence of eight hundred years proves to be natural enemies, they are France and England. On this question, which England so long considered as vital to her own interests as well as to those of Holland, it will amuse our readers to be reminded that when Lord (then Mr.) Grey moved, on the 21st February, 1793, an address to the Crown for peace with France, he did not attempt to deny that the opening of the Scheldt in spite of Holland might be a sufficient cause of war, but he insisted that Holland did not feel strongly about it, and that, even if she did, France had shown a disposition to concede the point. "The point in dispute," said Mr. Grey's address, "seems to us to have been relieved from a material part of its difficulty by the declaration of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, that the French nation gave up all pretensions to determine the question of the future navigation of the Scheldt."-Parliamentary Debates, February 21, 1793. France, however, has revived these pretensions, and Lord Grey has ratified them. On a previous evening, when advocating the interference of this country in favour of Poland, Mr. Grey contended that the same ground on which we justified our interference on the question of the Scheldt, ought to have induced us to interfere in favour of Dantzic, for we were guarantees of her independence as strongly as we were guarantees of the exclusive navigation of the Scheldt.—Ibid., February 18, 1793. In those days Mr. Grey did not venture even to contemplate the possibility of our abandoning Holland on this question, though it would have very well suited his argument; for, then as now, he was advocating an alliance with revolutionary France -in that alone consistent-for, as to the rest, he has abandoned both Poland and the Scheldt. VOL. XLIX. NO. XCVIII. 2 N therlands therlands we have acquiesced in her occupation of Algiers, and her colonization of an unlimited tract of the African coast of the Mediterranean, a possession not less important as regards our maritime interests than even that of the richer but more remote provinces of the Nile; and when looked at, with reference to the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and to the ultimate safety of Spain and Italy, we do not hesitate to say, that it assumes a most formidable aspect. When the French undertook the Algerine expe dition, the Duke of Wellington's ministry, as is abundantly proved by the papers recently laid before Parliament, lost no time in demanding and finally obtaining from the French court pledges that France did not aim at the permanent possession of Algiers, and still less at territorial aggrandizement on the African coast; but only-first, at reparation for gross injuries and insults which she had received; and secondly, at preventing for the future the system of piracy and slavery with which that state had so long afflicted Europe: and the French ministry engaged that, these objects being accomplished, the final settlement and disposal of the terri. tory and government of Algiers should be arranged in concert with the other European powers for the general advantage. And of these assurances the Wellington cabinet obtained a repetition from Louis Philippe and his ministers immediately after their accession to power. All these pledges and assurances have been now notoriously retracted by France; she revokes all her promises, and professes openly-and as a course of policy in which she glories-that France holds Algiers in her own right, and will colonize that territory to whatever extent she may think proper. When it comes to be examined, if ever we have time and patience to examine anything, the conduct of Louis Philippe will not much advance the credit of revolutionary kings. The Wellington cabinet found him, at the end of a great civil convulsion, on an unsteady throne-his present safety, his future prospects, and, what was still more urgent, the internal peace of France, depended on our immediate recognition. That cabinet, too generous, perhaps, asked but one question,' Will you adhere to treaties and engagements, and nommément to that concerning Algiers?' The new-made majesty answered, in substance,- Yes-yes-but take the assurance from my own mouth; do not wait for the formal delays of diplomacy-the case is urgent-the safety of France requires your instant recognition. Recognize me, then, and trust to the good faith of regenerated France and her chosen king to perfect our engagements in diplomatic form, as soon as we have leisure to do anything.' On this representation and assurance the recognition was given; and now, the written engagements of the old government, and the verbal pledges of the new one, are equally disregarded disregarded-and the Whig ministry submits to the double indignity! But though we doubt their courage to use it, we can give them a hint that would enable men of honour and spirit to settle this matter by return of post-the recognition of Louis Philippe was on the express condition of his keeping the engagements as to Algiers-let him be told that if he will not perform his part, we are released from ours! What he will not or cannot do, Henry the Fifth may! It III. Italy. We have been at first duped, and afterwards persuaded to allow France to seize, by a mixture of fraud and force, the most important point on the Adriatic shores of Italy; and her occupation of Ancona, by a species of burglarious entry in the night, has not only outraged all public faith and all European interests, but it has, in a more particular manner, counterbalanced and endangered British authority in the Mediterranean. is well known, that on the very day on which this expedition sailed, M. C. Perrier, then prime minister of France, most distinctly assured our credulous cabinet that no such expedition existed, or was designed; and this most monstrous breach not merely of international faith, but of individual pledge from one cabinet to another, has been acquiesced in, and, for aught we can see, tamely and timidly acquiesced in, by a British ministry. It is equally important and curious to observe, that just at the same moment, when we might have expected to have heard the strongest remonstrances against the fraud, violence, and falsehood of France in thus seizing the chief fortress of the Popethe most essentially neutral, and certainly the least aggressive sovereign in the world-we, on the contrary, took that favourable opportunity to send a minister to Rome-the first Englishman, we believe, who ever assumed any public character there-who, instead of any excuses for the violence already perpetrated, or any assurance of protection from further depredation, published a kind of manifesto against the papal government; and, under the pretence of recommending a representative system-(a representative system under an infallible pontiff!)-expatiated on every topic that was likely to create a revolt in the papal territories and a general conflagration in Italy. It was not enough to connive at the seizure of Ancona, we must also identify ourselves with the principles of France; our envoy acted as if he had been the missionary of the Parisian Society for propagating revolutions throughout the world.' And, lest any circumstances of folly should be wanting in addition to the mischief, the person selected for this mission was our resident at Florence, whose character and consideration at that court could not fail to be raised by his being abstracted from his ordinary duties to play the part of Massaniello 6 in the great Italian drama, which we must suppose our ministry meditated. But-it may be asked, cui bono all this?-Why should a British ministry, with already enough to disarrange abroad, and more than enough to mismanage at home, permit itself to be entangled in these additional difficulties, and to be committed with these new and extraordinary extensions of French domination? We know not. Is it insanity, or, what seems to us almost equivalent, a love or a fear of France? France has some old scores to wipe off with us; and have our ministers discreetly consented to allow her to repay herself from others, claims which they dare not discharge themselves? Insensible as we are to all matters of foreign policy, and regardless as we seem to be of all colonial and commercial interests, it would not yet have been safe to have ceded Gibraltar or Malta. The ambition of our new friend must, therefore, be satisfied with what we can just now manage to give her― Algiers as a counterbalance to Gibraltar, and Ancona as a substitute for Malta. IV. Greece. We have allowed her army to occupy Greece, to take the merit of the settlement of that country, if it be settled, or, in the alternative, to reap the advantage of its not being settled; and as a preliminary step to this, we have been forward in reducing the power, and of course in accelerating the overthrow of our ancient ally, the Turk-to the great profit and security, no doubt, of our Levant and Indian trade. And for this desirable end, we have allied ourselves with Bavaria, almost the only power in the world whose alliance can be of no use to us; and in the alleged distress of our own finances, we have guaranteed our share of a loan of sixty millions of livres to make Prince Otho King of Greece-a German King of Greece! This loan, it was alleged, was absolutely necessary to set the new kingdom a-going, and to provide for the unavoidable and pressing exigencies of a new government; yet, if we are not misinformed, a fifth of the whole loan (12,000,000 livres) has been diverted from its intended, its urgent, its necessary purposes, to purchase from the Turks some insignificant, and perhaps injurious, alteration of the mountain boundary of the new kingdom, which all parties had accepted, and which they had solemnly bound themselves to observe. And this is called improving the frontier by a successful negociation! V. Turkey. After inflicting our utmost vengeance on the Pasha of Egypt, for having, according to his duty and allegiance, assisted his sovereign in the Greek contest, and on that sovereign for accepting the aid of his subject, affairs have been so dexterously managed, that the sovereign and subject have been involved in direct hostilities against each other. The victorious arms of Ibrahim have threatened the very existence of the Otto man |