| 1118 L5 for this girl, and I would have sold here had it not been for Mr. Mish, who sent me here.'"
From the London Times, Jan 1st.
The impression produced by the message of the President of the United States upon the continent of Europe is not without interest to ourselves at the present juncture; for although England asks no assistance, and requires no support, from any foreign nations for the maintenance of her territorial rights, yet she acknowledges the weight of public opinion in the world, and she appeals with more sincerity than Mr. Polk to the judgment other States may form of her policy in this dispute. The conduct of the American government in the course of the Oregon negotiation may be summed up in very few words. They have thought fit to extend the principle of self-government at home beyond the limits of their own frontiers. The moment Texas and Oregon were believed, or declared, by the people of the United States, to belong to their territories, they were treated as if they had already been annexed, and the Union began to talk of defending its rights, without recollecting for one instant the right of other people. In the course of these extraordinary proceedings no considerations of good faith, or conflicting claims, have had the least weight with them.-They may be said most emphatically to covet their neighbor's goods and every thing that is his! for, according to Mr. Polk, a brief interval is all that separates the conception of this illicit passion from its complete gratification.-Hence they not only assail the particular rights or possessions of their neighbors, upon which at one time or another they chance to have cast their furtive eyes; but they violate the whole system of the pacific economy of the world, and proclaim a direct hostility to all the principles of civilized nations.
Mr. Polk declares in the most implicit language, that, as far as the continent of North America extends, the United States are determined to warn off all intruders. The President at Washington is lord of the manor; all the other American powers are copy-holders under him, and whenever a fresh enclosure bill is passed, the sovereign republic is to secure the lion's share-or, rather these other powers are mere tenants by sufferance, whose claims will be quashed upon the first dispute, and who will infallibly be ejected in the end.
We are not now pleading our own cause in the question of Oregon, or writing with reference to the encroachments which must, ere long, be directed against the oldest British settlements in America, if such a principle as this be allowed to prevail. For the maintenance of these rights we look confidently to the strength of England, which inspires a secret dread even to those who have ceased to acknowledge the obligations of good faith and justice. If we are ourselves, after Mexico, the most open to these attacks we are also by far the best prepared to repel them. But it cannot be too often repeated that, be the issue of this country what it may, all Europe is more or less interested in the duty of moral and political resistance to this assumption of universal dominion on the part of the United States, which can only be compared to the arrogant pretensions of a successful conqueror, when his triumph over the independence of the world is all but complete. If such principles as these are to regulate the policy of America, and the relations of States on the continent, how long will they be excluded from Europe? The fashion of attacking the weak and plundering the helpless, and exalting dubious claims into absolute rights, would soon find its application here. It is the spirit of the factious which deliberates about war and national honor in the French chambers; it is the motive of unscrupulous politicians all over the world. In Europe we see it happily crushed and imprisoned; but in the United States it speaks with the voice of the Executive Government and threatens to wield the power of a nation.
The language of the principal organ of the French Government upon the President's message, is of the greatest importance, because, without entering into the merits of the Oregon question, it clearly establishes how the policy of France is with reference to the general relations of France and America. Mr. Polk has applied language to the conduct of the French Government in the affair of Texas which is more unmeasured, because it was uncalled for, than his declarations against ourselves. We are persuaded that the Cabinet of the Tuilleries will take the earliest opportunity of answering these aspersions and attacks as they deserve. There is not one conservative policy in Europe and another in America. The cause of peace and the principles of order are every where the same. They cannot, under any circumstances, be sacrificed with impunity to local interests or to political theories. The consistency and the integrity of the leading statesmen of Europe require that the pretensions of the United States should be explicitly denied; and the Cabinet of Washington will ere long perceive that we have taken our stand, not upon a mere question of territorial right, though that is one not easily to be shaken, but upon
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