OTAHEITE.
Tin language of some members of the French Chambers who have hitherto been strenuous supporters of the pacific policy of M. Ginzor, lends to the Otaheite quarrel an importance beyond that which is intrinsic.
The mere affair between the French Commandant, Queen POMARP, and Mr. PRITCHARD, does not appear difficult of solution. The French Government has disclaimed the sovereignty of the island ; and the British Government has offered no objection to the protectorate assumed by France. The French Government has no call upon it to countenance the usurpations of the Commandant : it can without compromise of honour order him to undo what he has done. On the other hand, Mr. PRITCHARD, at the time of his arrest, had voluntarily abdicated the office of British Consul: the British Government has not been insulted in his person. All that is incumbent on the British Government is to ascertain the amount of injury be has received as a private person, and if he has suffered innocently, to call upon the French Government to procure him redress as a private person. Future squabbles might be guarded against by employing the French officers implicated and the exConsul of England where they could do least harm.
If the controversy could be left to the exclusive management of the Ministers of state on either side, there would be little danger of war. The material interests at stake are trifling in the extreme ; and the discussion of such minute yet difficult technical points as are involved in the present question is an admirable sedative of the passions kindled by disputes about the point of honour.
Ministers, however, must defer to the public will; and, unluckily, agencies are actively at work to stimulate popular passion on both sides. The French press is more exclusively a literary speculation than the English ; it is less under the sobering influence of mercantile and material interests and considerations ; its necessary bias is on all occasions to take the imaginative and sentimental view of political questions. And the French constitution gives an undue preponderance to the literary and official class—to the class most apt to be excited by the exaggerations of fine writers. There are few large capitalists in the electoral body of France ; the great mass of landowners and cultivators is in a manner excluded from it ; and the professors and civil and military employes, who preponderate in it, sympathize with the exaggerations of the journalists, and are as little checked by prudential considerations as they are. But, though it is chiefly in France that the prudence of rulers is most likely to be overborne by a popular clamour, the state of the public mind on this side of the Channel is not altogether tranquillizing to lovers of peace. John Bull is not 'quite so reasonable and pacific an animal as he sometimes affects to call himself; and there is no want of effort to stimulate his pugnacious propensities on the Otaheite question. This very week has witnessed a meeting in the City, at which one " reverend " gentleman presided and three reverend orators made speeches, all to the effect that the Otaheite question was "not a religious but a political one," and that Great Britain ought to go to war with France on behalf of Queen POMARE.
And there is this further danger, that, as is usual in such cases, the formal question arising out of the rivalry of French and British subjects in Otaheite throws little light on the real merits of the disputants or the importance of the controversy. The facts appear to bAriefiy these. In 1836, two French Roman Catholic missionaries visited Otaheite : as soon as their arrival was known they were expelled from the island. It is asserted by the French, and not denied by the parties accused, that this was done at the instigation of the English Protestant missionaries ; and it is admitted that when a French vessel visited Otaheite to demand compensation for the expelled priests, the money was advanced to Queen PomAnt by the English missionaries. In 1838, a law was passed by Queen POMAHE proclaiming the Protestant religion the religion of the state. Mr. Peireaaan admits that this law was passed at his instigation ; but his apology is that Admiral DOPETIT Tuoueas advised him. It was out of these hostile demonstrations against missionaries, subjects of France, that the disputes between the French officer commanding in the Pacific arose, which ended in the assumption of the " protectorate " of Otaheite by France. Not to extenuate the unmanly acts of violence attributed to the French officers, it is at least apparent from these facts that the English parties to the squabble do not come into court with hands altogether clean. In these transactions, the animating motives on the part of the French have, apparently, been jealousy of the progress of English colonization in the Pacific, and a wish to rival it. In this mood they have laid hold of the Marquesas and Otaheite. These acts
of rivalry would have been innocent of offence had not one of the islands occupied been already a quasi colony of Britain. The trade and cultivation of Otaheite, such as they are, are the work of British adventurers. The civilization of the Otaheitans is the work of British missionaries. Otaheite has been irregularly colonized, not by the British Government, but by British subjects. Our Government has first allowed English interests to establish and develop themselves in Otaheite, and then, by shrinking from recognizing it as a colony, or accepting its proffered submission to a British protectorate, has incapacitated itself from protecting these interests by peaceable means. Barring the prior claim of Great Britain in virtue of discovery and occupation, the French Government had as good a right to take possession of Otaheite as the
English to take possession of New Zealand. The right arising frons our earlier title the British Government have formally disclaimed e France therefore was free to act ; the treaty with Queen Posisai is at least as good as the treaty with the chiefs of Waitangi. But the British Government cannot alter the fact that the people of Otaheite are a mixture of English and Anglicized nations. It has denuded itself of the power to protect the English subjects there against the assumption of sovereignty by France and its consequences; it has placed itself in the humiliating position of being unable to assert the rights of English subjects except by a war. These are the fruits of the temporizing and vacillating policy of late Governments, which, by abandoning the old English policy of colonization, have forced upon the enterprising spirits of Britain the necessity of colonizing irregularly. These are the fruits of Missionary jealousy, which has insidiously encouraged Government in countenancing irregular colonization in the hope of keeping out secular rivals. The miserable policy dictated by sectarian aims and political faineantise nearly allowed New Zealand to slip through our fingers as Otaheite has done, forced us into a not very honourable compromise respecting the Sandwich Islands, and now threatens to involve us in a war about Otaheite.
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