Delaware State Journal, Advertiser And Star

DECLINE OF BRITISH INFLUENCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN.

(From the Guardian.)

We still exercise an absolute sovereignty over the little peninsula of Gibraltar, and the strong but diminutive island of Malta; and a protective sovereignty over the Ionian Isles, calculated to give us a defensive control over the affairs of those countries which border upon the Adriatic; and in some, though a less extensive degree, an influence upon the concerns of Greece and the Archipelago generally. The connecting chain of its influence was our former, our natural, and, we may say, our necessary alliance with the Porte; which fully established our importance and superiority in every respect for all beneficial purposes over the immense range of the coasts of Asia Minor on the northern, Syria on the eastern, and Egypt, with the States of Africa tributary to the Porte, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. This, we say, was once our position.

But what, we again ask, is it at present? We have Gibraltar. The French, in addition to the southern sea frontier of their own territory, have established themselves on the opposite shore of Africa, at a point which, for all purposes within the Mediterranean is as far superior to Gibraltar as the latter is superior to all others for controlling the passage through the Straits. From the territory of Algiers, our kind allies are extending their influence eastward and westward; and if Lord Palmerston be much longer Foreign Minister of England, we shall find them established at Tangier, disputing the command of the Straits, and at Tunis equally controlling the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and the western shores of Italy, from the Calabrian capes to the gulf of Genoa. We have Malta. With the possession of Tunis—and, for aught we know, Tripoli, which may even be contemplated as the boundary of the French African empires—Malta would be reduced to a third-rate degree of importance. We have sovereignty of the Ionian Islands, giving us, to a certain extent, a control over the affairs of the Adriatic, and thus opening Italy by its eastern boundary. Here, again, we are counteracted by our worthy allies of the barricades, who, in time of profound peace, have forcibly possessed themselves of the principal towns of the Pontifical states within that sea. We had paramount influence in the councils of the Porte. That influence is surrendered without effort to the arrogant intrigues of France, or the more cautiously proposed, but not less determined, views of the Autocrat of the north.

The open, and almost obsequious advances of the Pacha of Egypt, not once but frequently made, would have established for us, by the most ordinary regard to our interests in that quarter, if not a paramount, at least an equal, influence throughout the vast range of country which, with its important intervening islands, forms the head of the Mediterranean; and which will, at no distant period, become the direct line of communication with the southern countries of Asia. But what if, in addition to the established influence of France in that quarter, it should prove that an absolute secession of territory to our allies has taken place, in a position exercising, from its locality, immense influence over the affairs of that portion of the Mediterranean and its surrounding coasts? And yet such things are more than whispered. In truth, and we grieve to say it, the last two or three years have been spent by the British ministry, as far as our foreign affairs are concerned, in converting our neighbors and most firm allies, by acts of unparalleled injustice, into bitter foes, at the bidding of the French government, whilst our more distant alliances and the influence arising from them, are all frittered away, and their benefits thrown into the lap of the same good allies! Poor England! To be thus dragged through the mire at the heels of a nation whose utmost ambition it is, and ever has been, and whose every hope and every effort has for its real object, to cripple our resources, to weaken our influence, and, finally, if within the range of her power, utterly to destroy us!