The Anti-British proceedings which are just at present the game
of the French Parliament, have been kept under by the Ministry More successfully than could have been expected. The draft of the address in the Chamber of Deputies has indeed been made to include a paragraph approving of the refusal to ratify the Slave- trade treaty of 1841, and suggesting the abrogation of the treaties of 1831 and 1833; but it is couched in as delicate language as possible. It has yet to be debated.
The attempts to graft such a passage on the Peer's draft of an address have been foiled. The debate in the Upper Chamber has given M. Guizor an opportunity of declaring himself emphatically against the demand for the abrogation of the treaties ; and he at- tnblites the retraction from the treaty of 1841 to nothing but pub- lic clamour in France. His speech on the subject has procured him praise on this side of the Channel. Not so his avowal that it is an object with France to maintain the family of Bourbon on the throne of Spain—that is, to give ISABELLA the Second a Bourbon husband. There is something particularly idle in thus praising whatever happens to accord with English views, abusing whatever is opposed to them. It is the old joke about orthodoxy and hete- rodoxy, literalized in the most glaring manner. M. Guizoz, it is true, is cosmopolite in his disposition and intellect ; but still he is necessarily more Frenchman than Englishman, though we bring him before the tribunal of English opinion, without even a half- foreign jury. He resembles our own Prime Minister in being what may be called an exalted expedientist: he desires to do the best that can be done ; for to suppose that he retains office with any other object, were to suppose an absurdity in a man of his stamp. But the best that he can do is just that which he does—mitigate and temper the impulses of his countrymen. To contradict them out- right, would merely be to go out of office, and not to do what can be done. Besides, as we have said, he is after all a Frenchman : if he does not approve all that his countrymen demand, no doubt he sympathizes with their feelings, with their wishes as the wishes of his countrymen, and possibly even shares, without knowing it, the excitement of the time ; as the soberest man at a convivial party, while putting a restraint upon his heated companions, cannot altogether chase the fumes of the wine from his own head. It is not sound criticism thus nicely to balance in English scales every sentence that the acting Premier of France may say about this or that country : you will not thus accurately find his true weight and worth. Suffice it, that on the whole he is a conservative check on the aggressive impulses of the French ; that he rules, better probably than any other man known in the political world of Faris, for peace. It matters little whether France is opposed to us on this or that special point : without denying the importance of preveoting a misalliance for the Queen of Spain, or still more the importance of not forcing on the young girl an odious brute or idiot for a husband, it is yet of chiefest importance that France and England should desire a mutual friendship. For France to beat us on a point of diplomacy, were of less moment than for France to be hounded on to a struggle in which we must retaliate with reluctant cruelty.
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