6 SEPTEMBER 1851, Page 9

POSTSCRIPT.

SATURDAY.

There is no farther information this morning on the exciting and im- portant topic of Cuba. In the absence of new facts, there is a flood of comment on the cardinal fact already known, the execution of the fifty- two captive invaders in cold blood at Havanna. Our press is of course unanimous on the legal right of the Spanish Government to make this tremendously severe example of preventive justice; but the opinions on the magnanimity of the act are as strongly the other way ; and the doubts concerning its policy are general and grave. Upon the second point, in reference to the revolting barbarity of such a political slaughter in cold blood, the Times pertinently reminds its readers, that "the punishment was not only commensurate with the offence, but consistent with the or- dinary practice of the parties offended."

"There was nothing in the transaction to indicate any violence of resolve as against foreigners or invaders. The measure dealt out to these fifty Americans would have been dealt just as unsparingly to fifty or five hundred Spaniards pronouncing' against the Colonial authorities. The military platoon is the ordinary instrument of political justice in Spain ; and a fusillade in a square is the invariable termination of an imeute, which never, perhaps, made as much noise in the world as the musketry by which it was closed."

The policy of magnanimity Spain will never learn. But nothing is more probable than that her excess of vigour in repelling the first crowd of a host of unprincipled invaders will raise a general phreszy of " reta- liation " throughout the United States, that will only consummate the robbery whioh Spain struggles to resist.

By yesterday's accounts from Paris it appears that the number of arrests already made for complicity in the newly-discovered "plot," was two hundred and seventy-two in Paris alone. Orders had been sent to arrest a great number of persons in the provinces.

Of the eighty-five General Councils, seventy-four had declared in fa- vour of revision of the Constitution. But that fact is not by itself deci- rive, for many of the declarations required that the revision should be keel.