FRANCE AND TUNIS.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 530, 12 August 1881, Page 3

FRANCE AND TUNIS.

Concerning the action taken by France towards Tunis, our Paris coirespoitdent writes as follows:—

The- Krouinirs are as difficult to find us the L<>4 Tribes. Rochefort, who avowed from the first the Kroninir was a myth, now admits, to fippease the ire of the Ministerial Press, that one had been found before the marabout of Sidi-Abdallah, counting Ins beads, but that it was hardly worth while mobilising 50,000 troops to effect such a capture. As a set off, the ■'•independent Bey," agniust whom no declaration of war had been made, has been captured. In the rneantimo the generals pursue their turning movements, and if their numerous reports do not contain anything definite as to the -annihilation of the Kroiunirs, they attest at least the state of the weather and theexccllonce of the troops at razzias. Glory will come in duo course.

The crowning victory over the independent Bey has undoubtedly intoxicated the French a little, and those who do not perceive the connection between Tenterden stueple and Goodwin Sands in their organising an expedition to punish frontier marauders, as ostensibly proclaimed, and finishing by appropriating Tunisia, are on a par with Prussians, or rather with the Latin sisters ot Italy and the unspeakable Turk, for Bismarck's people are anything but the last of men now.

Two facts -are notorious—coolness between France and England, and an outbreak of that old Adam in the French, a thirst for conquest and .military glory. Bismarck maintains the latter endemic is a necessity i'or the French every ten years, and naturally he prefers the plague te be localised in the Regency rather than in Alsace. Similarly, Austria id delighted to see the Italians fix their irrkknta aspirations towares Nico and Corsica, rather than upon Trieste. There is much that is .parallel between the conduct of M. Guizot and tbe Spanish marriages, in 1843, and that of M. Ferry

and Tunis. In both cases the French promised not to do a certain thing, but did it not tiie less. One waa prepared for crooked ways on the part or! the Orleanist Minister, who openly advocated people making money by every means—"Put money in thy purse, Koderigo " —but under the Athenian Republic to assure the world in general, and England in particular, that France aid not intend annexing or protecting Tunis, and the© putting I he Regency in her pocket, lias disappointed the well-wishers of the Third Republic, while causing many serious people to indulge in a Burleigh simko of the head. The Americana would even apply a stronger term thmi "Mmirfc" to tho proceeding. .Hut what i.s more regrettable h i the i:\-A that the few scrioud jyuniiil:,, ! which i'urcu;nor : j Scoked to for the s-eriuiu ophiwi 'A Franco, defend tiic morality <>[ the proceeding , . T!u Ihidical journals, on

tho contrary, denounce this newest phase of opportunism. M. Lemoine, in the Debats, writes that the protests of England are very little honorable, when it is remembered how she took Cyprus. John Bull never told France or any ol her Power) that ho intended to punish a Jew Cyprians and instead appropriated . the island ; ho did not present a lifle at the head of the Sultan, and remain in the antechamber two hours to give him time to decide or disappear. Under such circumstances "free will" agents like the Bey eign, and the pressure once removed, they repudiate their act, effected by coercion. The French Legislature will have a difficult nut to crack when honorable members are acked to ratify a treaty that one of the high contracting parties repudiates. But as the Republicans allege, the country has baen destroyed by the teachings of the Jeeuits, the voting of the treaty will likely be assured. The French laugh—for in a gendarmerie when one gendarme laughs all the gendarmes laugh —at having " done " the Bey and " walked round " the Powers ; but those laugh best who laugh last. Confidence in the Republic has been shaken by its proceedings towards the Bey, and a good deal of the noisy writing against England, etc., has for e.;d to turn aside attention from a shady affair. It is an Old Bailey maxim, when you have not a good caae abuse the opposite side.