able, because the least prepared for. Such is the warfare now carrying on by France against this country-a warfare singularly abetting the views, if not covertly concerted with Russia. Leaving for the present out of view other prominent features of this creeping and clandestine system of aggressive inroad, deferring to another account and the final balance sheet the gigantic strides of French plunder and usurpation in Northern and Western Africa, let us sum up here only the story of French invasion and French aggression in America, North and South. The field of encroachment is vast and various, but of the three quarters of the world where French aggrandisement has been at work, by fraud and falsehood first, and, as success emboldened, with front more hardy, throwing off the scarcely deceptive mask afterwards, and parading the resolve of force to maintain, the concerns of one quarter at once will suffice to task sufficiently the temper of our readers and our own patience. The scene of action even thus circumscribed, will serve to show, that however Louis Philippe may lack the lion heart and eagle eye of Napoleon the Emperor, he is noways behind hand in the craft and cunning of Bonaparte the Corsican. Ships, colonies, and commerce, was the cry of Bonaparte; ships, colonies, and conquests, the echo of the barricade Sovereign; the insidious intent of one, as of the other, being to accomplish these objects at the expense of Great Britain, and by indirectly warring on her commerce, to sap the foundations of her maritime preponderance. Hence this country is insidiously attacked through the sides of its firmest allies and most gainful alliances. The blows ostensibly aimed against Mexico, Buenos Ayres, and Brazil, are no other than sidelong stabs, really meant for the most vital points of British interest, whilst in all the underplot accessories of the same drama, the one great ruling feature of the finale is never

lost sight of. Concurring circumstances are all but too favourable for the catastrophe preparing afar off. Powerful and rival navies, created around us as if by enchantment, and proudly careering over seas where once the British ensigns floated supreme in unequalled and almost solitary grandeur, whilst the wooden walls of old England, which once attested the extent of her supremacy, and exacted homage to her dominion whereever winds could waft or oceans bear them, are now laid up and rotting in ordinary-our proudest dock-yards so wasted of stores, and unreplenished, that not one solitary spar for a lower mainmast could recently be found in them to rig out the pleasure craft of an exvice regal Whig functionary * — the once well-garnished rooms of our spacious arsenals so despoiled, bargained away to France, or shamelessly made away with to Spain, that it may be truly said, scarcely a musket remains to be shouldered, or a shot left in the locker-all this with, to crown all, a Cabinet where, in its nine members, stand prominently personified indolence and ignorance consummate, solemn pedantry and petulance in petto, upstart self-conceit and high-born arrogance all-blustering, self-sufficiency all smirking, and solid acres in all their stolidity, the remnant of vigour on crutches, and of saintly talent everdozing all this is indeed prophetic of wo to the land. Rottenness and corruption are in the high places, and what hope of safety and deliverance in times coming can be hoped for from dupes and dottards, who have deceived none but their country, and served none but its foes. Such are the men wielding, or assuming to wield, with puny hands, the energies of a great nation, under whose eyes, and in contempt of whose imbecility, a series of insults have been perpetrated, and actual hostilities commenced, by the French upon Mexico, more unprovoked and flagrant than ever characterised even the most cruel

ducted.

and capricious outbreak of Bonaparte himself, with the single exception, perhaps, of that one act, more atrocious than all-the invasion of Spain. Let

meanness never

us add, that this Mexican outrage partakes largely of a chargeable upon the France Imperial of Napoleon; in the shabby style of a shabby sovereign, to whom even ambition is second to the base passion of money-getting, Louis Philippe has engrafted a pecuniary interest upon political designs-has raised a question and fixed the amount of damages in the names of individuals and subjects; and should the cause be gained, he claims the repartition of the spoil, with a view to an appropriation of the lion's share to himself. The sum of damages arbitrarily laid is roundly taxed at 600,000 hard dollars, of the various items composing which, some few are furnished with a certain detail, and the Mexicans required to take the rest on trust. It is indeed true, that the system of claims to indemnities did not, originate with Louis Philippe ;-he only improved them at a monstrous rate of compound interest. The account commenced in 1828, and when first rendered, fell vastly short of the grand total now demanded. For nonpayment of this, the Mexican ports are now blockaded, the Mexican territory about to be invaded, and though last, not of least consideration, British commerce and property are sacrificed, or wantonly perilled, to the extent of millions. Here indeed lies the hidden and the chief, though unavowed incentive to the Mexican quarrel. To cripple as well as to humble Great Britain, whilst at the same time filling his coffers from the mines of Mexico, dragooning her into treaties of commerce on unequal terms, forcing markets for the manufactures, and aggrandising the marine of France-these form the artfully woven meshes of the policy within the toils of which the cherished Downing Street hunter of Parisian salons lies perdu-from which the less enervated Aztecs of the Cordilleras are hardily struggling to get free. In humble imitation of Louis Philippe himself, let us take the money question first in order, and then the commercial and political. On the 4th of December, 1828, an insurrection of the masses was celebrated in Mexico, and a general sack of property took place, known as the Saquee del Parian. The sovereign peo

ple of Mexico, in fact, had their glorious three days, as two years afterwards the good people of Paris had theirs; the which, if nothing else, should have created a fellow feeling in the breast of Louis Philippe. The account-current of damage then furnished for pillage by eight French establishments, amounted to 122,590 dollars, of which to the extent of no less than 74,800 dollars was claimed by one bookseller alone. Monsieur Hypolite Seguin, the modest claimant for this moderate sum of about L.16,500 in the article of books, admitted, with edifying candour, that proofs he had none to establish the fact of the loss in detail, for the plunderers had done him the good turn of carrying off his books of account, along with his other matters in the book way. Now, taking an average of French books at four shillings the volume, which, to those who know any thing of the base quality of the article in general, whether as regards the wretchedness of the paper, the miserable type, or the sort of works exported from, or indeed published in France, must appear a high average. The sum quoted for this book pillage would represent a library of about 82,000 volumes; according to which, the people of the city of Mexico must be admitted not only not to be the barbarians the French would now make them, but to possess a passion so extraordinary for learning, that they actually gorged themselves with literature. The difference between the mobs of Paris and Mexico was therefore immense, but the balance of civilisation and taste was all in favour of the half-clad savages of the Andes. The Parisian liberty boys, as we can testify, were solely occupied, during their three days of robbery and riot, with the sack of palace and private house trappings, and the well-garnished tills of shopkeepers-with clearing out restau rateurs, iron-grated bakeries, and wine shops. Such was the lack of relish for literary plunder, that shortly afterwards, during another glorious emeute, we ourselves witnessed, with pain indescribable, the splendid and plenteously-furnished library of the Archbishop of Paris contemptuously pitched out of the windows into the Seine, whose course it choked up, although the jolly brutes, less lettered than those of Mexico, were specially

conservative, for their own use, of the Archbishop's larder and wine cellar. The book-damage case of M. Seguin, it will be seen, was preposterous enough, and he must have reconciled the estimate to his conscience by taxing the books according to weight, on the Prussian Custom-house system, his trumpery stock of stale Paris shopkeepers being placed in the scales, and weight for weight reduced into golden onzas at par. Finding in the Government a disposition to entertain the question of these exorbitant claims, subject of course to a preliminary process of examination, another smaller batch of indemnity demands was painfully got up seven months afterwards, for 30,500 dollars, followed in two months more by another list of less voracious, or more bashful bloodsuckers, for other 15,317 dollars. this state was the indemnity question at the appearance on the scene of Baron Deffandis, the new Plenipotentiary of France, who, in a note to the Mexican Foreign Secretary, dated the 19th of January, 1836, pressing for a settlement, stated the sum total at 168,378 dollars. During eight years, therefore, the amount and the number of claims remained stationary, from which it is fair to conclude that, during the interim, French residents had no peculiar causes for complaint.

In

With the advent of Baron Deffandis, however, a change came over the spirit of the times; grievance mongering under such auspices was a traffic too gainful to be confined to the Seguins more lucky riots occurred in Mexico-a brace of French buccaneers were shot at Tampico-some French smugglers were caught in the exercise of their honest craft, and the contraband property seized at Mazatlanother timely incidents fell out at Tehuantepee, Oajaca, and Orizava, so that, upon the whole, a goodly supplement to the Seguin catalogue was in course of less than two years scraped together, and without troubling himself or annoying the government with a bill of all particulars, the Baron at once, by a process of arithmetic all his own, summed up and sent in a total demand for 600,000 dollars, to be paid down on the nail without question or demur, not to the parties complaining, but to the French treasury; for, says the agent of the crafty and money-griping Louis Philippe, the government of

the king reserves to itself the liquidadation of the 600,000 dollars, as also the division thereof amongst the Frenchmen who have been sufferers in the Mexican territory," &c. Nothing, we apprehend, could well be more conclusive of the real opinion entertained of the equity of the grossly fraudulent claims than this impudent intimation of a design to share with the robbers, if not to appropriate the whole of the spoil. It forms truly a melancholy exhibition of the degraded state of political morality in France.

It is far beyond our purpose, and would be of our limits, to examine in detail such items or pretensions as are adduced by the French envoy in part justification only of the solid mass of metalico proposed to be abstracted from the Mexican mint, and transferred to the treasury of Louis Philippe ; but the dissection of a few will suffice for the character of the whole, with scarcely more than one exception, and that is in the case of five Frenchmen cruelly murdered during some tumults at Atenzingo in 1833, the atrocious perpretators of which could not be sufficiently disentangled from out the mob, and therefore the ends of justice, notwithstanding every exertion on the part of the Mexican authorities, were defeated. In behalf of the families of the victims a pecuniary mulct of 15,000 dollars is claimed, the equity of which there is little reason to dispute. But whilst admitting this, what must be thought of another item of 20,000 dollars; at which the lives of two French pirates are charged in the same account? The sufferers at Atenzingo are represented as honest industrious artizans or mechanics, who perished during a sudden outbreak of a misled populace against foreigners; the crime is visited at the rate of 3000 dollars each honest head only; but a deodand is levied at the rate of 10,000 dollars per head of two notorious freebooters and assassins taken in the act. The facts of the case of these men were notorious to all Mexico; all the authentic documents and examinations were in the hands of the French envoy, so that not a shadow of doubt could rest upon it; yet not only are these murderous robbers and ruffians elevated into martyrs, but their lives valued at more than three times the price of really unoffending subjects, according to the moral code of Louis

Philippe their mutual sovereign! The following is a brief recapitulation of the incidents of the Tampico grievance. In December, 1835, a small American bark from New Orleans, having on board a body of adventurers, brought to off Tampico, and having reason to know that the castle of the port was poorly garrisoned, and the town open and undefended by troops, a landing was effected, and the place assaulted. The inhabitants, however, took up arms, and with the help of the few troops there repulsed the assailants, who hastily retreated, leaving twenty-eight prisoners in the hands of the Mexicans, all foreigners, and among them the two Frenchmen in question. They were of course all tried before a military tribunal, according to military law, condemned, as was inevitable, and shot. The vessel in which they were embarked sailed under no flag; on landing they fought under none; they had forfeited therefore all rights as subjects of a friendly state, even if those rights had not been lost by the act of carrying arms against a country with which their own was at peace, according to the French civil code itself, (Art. 21, sec. 1. cap. 2. vol. i.) All the documents relative to the landing, the assault, the capture, the trial before a tribunal, presided over by the general commanding in these parts, though not at the action, assisted by an assessor, were duly laid before the French envoy, authenticated throughout by the requisite formalities and parties, and yet this man had the hardihood to assert in his ultimatum that no satisfactory explanation of the proceedings had been furnished. With remarkable assurance he descants therein upon "the butchery at Tampico in 1835, wherein twenty-eight foreigners, amongst whom were two Frenchmen, made prisoners by the Mexican troops, in consequence of an attack which they meditated upon the territory of the Republic, in favour of the Tejanos, were put to death a few days afterwards, in a yard, where they were surrounded and shot like wild beasts, and without the Mexican Government, up to the present moment, nearly two years that France has solicited, being able to show by virtue of what law, nor according to what judicial formality, they had been sen tenced and executed."

The defence of the Frenchmen on trial was that they were engaged at

New Orleans to join the expedition, upon the understanding that it was destined for Texas; and once on board, were compelled by their comrades, when off Tampico to accompany them to the assault. Such a defence was untenable on that or any ground. Texas was a province of Mexico, although in a state of insurrection-a fact of which they did not pretend ignorance. The truth, however, was, and they must have known it, that it was no better than a marauding expedition on the hunt for chances of plunder. Megia, under whose orders they were, was an expelled rebel. Tampico was selected as the point of attack, not only because ill-prepared and unsuspicious of danger, but because the brigands had notice, that by various conductas from the interior and the mines a vast treasure was accumulated there, estimated at 4 or 500,000 dollars in specie, the far larger portion of it British property, waiting the arrival of the first packet for transmission to England. Such are the particulars of the so called "butchery of Tampico," and such a faithful version of the story and the exit of the two French pirates Demonssent and Saussier.

Let the common sense and common honesty yet to be found in the world decide upon the scandalous perversion of truth, and the insolent disregard of the rights of an independent state, evinced in this single transaction on the side of the French government. It is singular, that with respect to the fate of the other twenty-six foreigners, associated in the freebooting foray, no complaint has been uttered by the States of which they were born subjects, and the cause is clear; their crimes had disqualified them from the privileges of birthright, had erased them from the category of nationality and citizenship, as in the case of the two Frenchmen. If compensation were justified in the one instance, so it must be in the other, so that at the rate of 10,000 dollars a head, Mexico should be called upon for 260,000 dollars more-at such a rate, not even the mines of Mexico in most splendid bonanza could satisfy the endless drain. The United States alone might prefer claims far more just for embattled citizens slain fighting under the insurgent flag of Texas. We cannot conclude our notice of this flagitious affair without the expression of our admiration