Diplomatists are at their favourite work again making much of
portentous trifles. They have acquired a habit Of minutely watch- ing each other's countenance ; and at length, taking the means for the end, just as the miser takes money for money's worth, these acute decipherers of the facial phwoomena have arrived at that point of mutual deference, that every tinge and twinge in the opposite visage possesses for them a substantive importance. This week, there has been a whole crop of these solemn levities. First, France and England are at diplomatic daggers-drawn about a thought or a word of Lord ABERDEEN'S. The Earl once objected to the French occupation of Algiers, and he does so still ; but, like a sensible man, he does not consider that question to be on the tapis just now. However, he and Count ST. Amman had some familiar conversation on it, which, according to the Count, Lord ABERDEEN closed by saying that he had no objection to make : Lord ABERDEEN himself says that be declared he had no observa- tion to make. The discrepancy of the nouns, and the turn of Lord ABERDEEN'S ideas, have put the French in a blaze—for that nation has a popular bent for the diplomatic. Next, the French Police have prohibited an Anti-Slavery meeting in Paris, lest it should occasion an Anti-British row—for the French can't abide our opposition to slavery; and thereupon out comes a distinguished diplomatist in the Morning Chronicle with taunts at the French because they are not so free to hold public meetings as we are. Then, the French functionaries are very troublesome to our daily papers by impeding their Indian expresses from Marseilles ; and the same diplomatic authority infers that M. GUIZOT can't sleep at nights for thinking of the newspapers that are on their way to the offices of the Chronicle and its contemporaries. And lastly, a mad friar, CASAREZ, who was agitating in Paris against a junction of CARLOS and CHRISTINA, has been banished from the French capital ; and the expounder of diplomatic propensities asserts that it is the mission of the French Police to hush the voice of sincerity and truth.
To what purpose all the taunts ? is it the object to widen the breach between the Earl of ABERDEEN and the French Govern- ment, on his abstract disapproval of their hold on Algiers? Such would be a master-stroke at once of Diplomatic and of Whig policy.
Previous page
