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NOTES OF THE MONTH.

ST. JUAN DE ULLOA.

The newspapers for the last month have been busy with accounts of the last grand victory "on the European plan," that has come off since the bombardment of Antwerp. The American continent, however, was the scene of the exploit; and it would seem that the great powers of Europe, finding opportunities for indulging in the favorite pastime of kings growing more and more scarce in their own hemisphere, are disposed to keep their hand in practice on our American soil, for when the question lies between Europe and this Continent, our pride of position becomes interested, no matter what may be the portion of its broad expanse affected. The capture of Vera Cruz by the French, and the bombardment of its noble fortress of St. Juan de Ulloa, with the destruction of many hundreds of lives of its defenders-as it were for a piece of royal sport, to give a young dandy of the blood an opportunity of fleshing his maiden sword, and of showing off to the officers of "la grande nation," and through the Moniteur to the legitimates of Europe, how coolly a prince of the new regime can command the battery of a frigate, or manœuvre a ship into line-has produced a startling effect on the public mind through this entire country. Our newspaper press-strikingly different in this respect from that of Europe-concerns itself but lightly with foreign intelligence, and seldom inquires into the morale of great events like this, as judged by those eternal principles by which our own national conduct, nay existence, is regulated and determined. But the people at large-and the people of this country, altogether independent of the newspapers, create its tone of public opinion and regulate its public action-have formed their own conclusions respecting this event, and will be slow to alter them. They view the whole transaction, and their opinion will be shared by the moderate and the thinking men of all countries, with unmitigated indignation, abhorrence, and disgust. Not one ray of that glory which streams over the page of French history from a thousand battles relieves the criminality of an occurrence which no despatches can make other than a high national outrage. In judging of the circumstances, it is not necessary to go deeply into the merits of the case at issue between France and Mexico. It is sufficient for our purpose to know that it was a matter of money, so contemptible in amount that even the political wrongmakers of the French budget could not swell its aggregate to the petty sum of six hundred thousand dollars; and that the Mexicans, also, admitting the propriety of redressing every well-founded grievance, repeatedly offered to submit the details of this redress to friendly arbitration. The knowledge of these facts is sufficient to make us view the sanguinary capture of St. Juan de Ulloa as an act of execrable atrocity, and the wholesale destruction of its garrison as a national murder, revolting to the moral sense of the whole civilized world, and appealing through that pervading instinct to eternal justice itself for punishment and retribution. The day has gone past when the military brilliancy with which it is executed can atone for an act, politically, because morally, wrong; or when the naval precision with which scientific tacticians can pour hot shot into a magazine, can blind attention to the sickening truth, that this sport, so exciting to a young hero of the Tuilleries, and so interesting a variation to the monotony of the Moniteur, has caused many hundred brave men to be wantonly sacrificed, in defending the honor of their country and the sanctity of its soil-and has been committed by a foreign power, having no national interest within thousands of miles even of the hemisphere, which its sanguinary politics have thus foully polluted.

This French blockade, in all its parts, whether of theory or practice, has jarred hideously with the new spirit of the age, and has awakened an attention to the subject which must result in the application of higher and simpler principles to national action than the exploded maxims of a diplomatic philosophy that is rapidly passing away with the principles it professed, and the systems that it regulated. It was a rude and tyrannical resort to the last extremity of violence, put in motion by the machinery of a diplomatic code born of the low chicanery of courts and kings, and of which the enormities might have remained forever unperceived in the recesses of cabinets, and amid the jarring interest of contending dynasties, but which has withered before the simpler righteousness of the popular intelligence, that from the level of the American Revolution first scrutinized its rules of action. This new spirit, which is now awakening the nations, looks in vain for justification of a prac tice which places a thousand innocent interests in jeopardy and punishment, because one may have sufficient wickedness combined with sufficient power to thrust its budget of grievances, real or pretended, into the face of a nation, and declare with selfish arrogance to every other having relations with it, that their peaceful pursuits shall cease, that their commerce shall be suspended, and that their claims and business of every sort, shall stand aside till the dust of submission shall be licked, and the full measure of its vindictive retribution been yielded up. This common sense of the popular intelligence says with justice and propriety, that the rule of right would be, if France is aggrieved by Mexico, and cannot obtain redress, she has the privilege to suspend all national intercourse with a people so faithless until justice has been done. She may shut the ports of France to Mexican trade, and interdict the Mexican people the use of every French commodity, until the public deprivation of such accustomed comforts shall compel from theie authorities full satisfaction of wrongs which grew out of that trade, and which must not be repeated if it is to be renewed. Or should this not be sufficient, reprisals might be made, as an extreme resort, on Mexican public property until compensation in full had been obtained. This is the extent to which equal and impartial justice between nations would authorize the French cabinet in proceeding. By the Law of Blockade, as now practiced, in seeking compensation for these temporary wrongs, she injures other nations to ten times the amount, and only leaves comparatively unscathed the object of her hostility. What right has France to point to a few frigates ranged along a thousand miles of coast, and arrogantly turn back the rich commerce of America from its destined ports? We surely have nothing to do with the petty tactics of King Louis Philippe, or with the desperate anxiety of his ministers to get up a showy report for the Chambers, and a few necessary bulletins for playthings to the listless heroes of the Barricades. England, too, has nothing to do with the quarrel, for the forcible adjustment of which, nevertheless, her merchants have in like manner to pay its whole amount thrice over in the heavy losses to which it has subjected them.

A better system of the Law of Nations would subject France to just demands for compensation from the people who have been thus heavily mulcted by this unreasonable and arbitrary method of redressing wrongs, which in the strictest sense of the words are merely marketable in their character.

The simple and sublime precepts of PEACE are rapidly revolutionizing our ideas of war and conquest. The divine principles of Christianity-the mission of Peaceare beginning to make themselves felt in the movements of nations-spreading unseen through the broad depths of the popular mind, and, identical with the evangelical spirit that is leavening the world, they are rapidly working upwards. till rulers shall ere long find that the horrid trade of war must cease, and that the masses of mankind will not be driven to the insensate destruction of each other without individual interest or cause of wrong whatever.

In this connexion, we are happy to refer to the fact, that prior to the departure of the French Bombarding Squadron, and as soon as its purpose was known, the Chief Magistrate of our Republican Confederation was not wanting to the high moral duty incumbent on the national representative of American democracy, of interposing to endeavor to arrest its destructive and sanguinary mission. A letter was despatched,

by a special messenger, from our President to the American legations at Paris and London, strongly, and in an admirable spirit and style, invoking a peaceable adjustment of the dispute, presenting the example of the reference of our own far more protracted and grievous wrongs to amicable arbitration; and offering the arbitration of the Government of the United States, or its mediation in any mode calculated to avert the impending public calamity of war and bloodshed.

In the terms we have here felt impelled to use, to give expression to the pain and abhorence with which every right feeling and right judging mind must be filled by the sickening contrast between the paltry end and the dreadful means in the present case, it is of course not our meaning to pass upon the French Government the full measure of condemnation of the moral atrocity of the act, which our language would apply to the act itself, and to the old and barbarous principles of international relations and rights on which those looking at it from a different point of view may found a justification of it. While we look with abhorence and disgust at the whole theory and practice of aggressive and vindictive war; and cannot let such an occasion pass without an expression of the natural sentiments of American democracy in relation to it; yet we know how to make the liberal allowance dictated by evenhanded justice, for men and for a government educated in a school of totally different ideas and influences.

FLOWERS OF CONGRESSIONAL RHETORIC.

We are proud to profess the honest pride which swells our bosom at the contemplation of every new display of American genius. In the indulgence of this sentiment, our patriotism does not confine itself within the narrow limits of mere party affinities; and when we observe such rare and exquisite flowers of fancy as the following, wasting their sweetness on the desert air of the ephemeral columns of a newspaper, we cannot resist the temptation of rescuing them from that undistinguished and perishing obscurity, to unite them in a bouquet which we here offer to our Whig friends and readers, as, we trust, an acceptable token of our liberality and candid appreciation of the brilliancy of imagination, the soaring boldness of conception, and the chaste delicacy of taste, of their favorite and foremost orators. The following incomparable and inimitable simile, to embody his conception of the stupendous wickedness of the Administration, will be readily recognised as the production of Mr. Menefee, of "Old Kaintuck,”—aut Diabolus aut Erasmus.

"He could perceive a feverish anxiety in the party in power, which indicated that after all the enormities which had come to light there were other and greater still behind. Hence the anxiety to stifle debate, and quench the light which was beginning to be shed on dark transactions long hidden from the public eye. After the proof had come of iniquity after iniquity, which had been plunged like avalanches from the heights of power into the pure lake of our republican institutions, now that Liberty was looking to this House for help, now came a solemn tirade in the Globe against wasting time in this most villanous debate, and an appeal to the liege subjects of the throne at once to put a stop to it; and while such intimations came from the Official Organ, simultaneously there was an effort, within the House, to smother documentary light."

To appreciate this the reader must gradually work up his imagination to the level of the Alpine sublimity of the idea; or if that is beyond his powers, let him get up as near to it as he can. Let him first figure to himself the Administration, a certain vague, impalpable, foul, and awful Idea, a monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum—u ith a bolster in one hand, like Othello, to stifle debate, and smother the fair form of “Documentary light,” and with a bucket in the other to quench the aforesaid peculiar description of light, should the smothering operation not prove sufficient to kill it. Let him next plant the monster on the top of Mont Blanc, brooding in grim horror over the verdant vales sleeping in tranquil loveliness and security below. Let him fuse into a "pure lake" our republican institutions, and 'locate' it at or near the base of the monster. When he has

well realized this magnificent image, let him set it to work to make avalanches, which can be done on these "heights of power" by merely rolling snowballs about among the eternal snows with which Byron informs us that the "monarch of mountains" has been crowned as with a diadem. Let him then make it tilt them over the verge of the awful height, and roll them down one after another, crashing, dashing, smashing, and finally splashing in the "pure lake" aforesaid, which we hope he has still borne in mind. Let him then fancy "Liberty" rising out of the bosom of the waters,

"As Venus, when she rose,

Effulgent, on her pearly car, and smiled,

Fresh from the deep, and conscious of her form,"—

not quite killed, but only stunned, by this pitiless pelting of avalanches; and though unable to speak the indignant grief with which her bosom is laboring, or to cry out either help or murder, yet looking unutterable things to the House of Representatives; when lo! she is interrupted by the entrance of “the Man of the Globe," who reads a solemn tirade from his columns about her wasted and misspent time, and has the additional cruelty to raise a clamor to prevent her being heard at all. Let the reader plume the wings of his imagination, and lash himself up to a fine phrenzy, by the contemplation of such stupendous imagery as this, and then he may venture to follow at a humble and admiring distance in the wake of Mr. Menefee's career of eloquence. We cannot doubt that he will then be quite prepared to yield up all his common sense to the witching fascination of such overpowering rhetoric, to abandon the Administration, with all its Democracy, State-Rights, Divorce of Bank and State, &c. &c., in despair and disgust, to its merited fate, and conclude with the same eloquent young gentleman, that—

"It might as well at once, with arms crossed, and hearts resigned, come up to that bar, where the American people would pass upon its deeds, and award their due recompense. That People would embody the iniquities of ten long years, and, placing them on the head of the victims, would stretch the sacrificial knife, and calling on Heaven, would make one great expiatory offering to the God of Liberty!"

The monster, from this passage, must certainly be allowed the merit of grea meekness and condescension to submit thus quietly to a fate so horrid. This com bination of judicial and sacrificial cruelty-with such examplary piety, that like Giacomo in Fra Diavolo, it must say its prayers before it plunges its knife into the throat of its willing victim-is certainly a new feature in the character of the "American People." We are afraid the examples of the Canadian executive have been too contagious. "The God of Liberty," however, after being frightened into a change of sex by the concussion of the avalanches, certainly deserved the atonement of such a sacrifice.

After this combination of horrors, a change of imagery will be grateful, and the reader accordingly will be much refreshed by accompanying Mr. Prentiss of Mississippi, from the dizzy Alpine heights of Mr. Menefee to the great depths of Mill Pond or York Bay. We again reeur to the newspaper report:

"Mr. Prentiss said he was as well pleased as the gentleman who had just taken his sea at witnessing the sensation in certain parts of this House at every fresh haul of truth from the great deep of this Administraton's secrets. The great oyster-bed had not been dis turbed for years, now, and he did not doubt that another grab would bring above water larger and fatter oysters than any which had yet been opened! Yes, there were other fine fish below, which had not yet been hooked up or speared. He was for trying all ways to get at them; lines, nets, spears, harpoons; any means and all means he was for trying so that by some means the fish might be made to appear above water."

We opine that it would be essential to the success of this experiment that the ocean do not chance to be at the moment in the state of "boiling like a pot," under the keels and paddles of our American steamboats.

Which of these varieties of eloquence the reader will prefer, must be left to individual taste. We cannot presume to be the arbiters of such a rivalry of rhetoric,

but content ourselves with thus awarding to both our magnanimous tribute of admiration, without any invidious discrimination of preference, presenting each, with equal honors, to our readers in both hemispheres, and to posterity, as choicest models of the highest order of the Whig eloquence of the present day in the House of Representatives—

Arcades ambo,

Et cantare pares, et respondere parati.

MATCH OF CHESS BETWEEN NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON.

It is generally known to the votaries of this noble game in this country—if no higher name will be permitted by those unacquainted with its merits, and judging it only by its apparent results-that a public Match by correspondence has for some time been in progress between the rival Chess clubs of New York and Washington, the commercial and political capitals of the Union. As we have been several times requested to make its progress known to those of our readers interested in the subject, it may find a not inappropriate place on this page. The match was commmenced in January, 1838-the challenge proceeding from New York. Two games are played simultaneously, each party having the first move in one game. The stake is a small amount, to be appropriated to the purchase of some suitable trophy of victory. The time allowed for each move is one week. One of the games was at one period interrupted for a few moves, by a claim by the New York club to a default, presumed to have been incurred by the other party by a failure to move within the allotted term. The claim was disputed, and is still in suspense, the game having been resumed and continned as a "back game," in case of the claim being eventually sustained. Of the merits of the respective play, and the probable issue of the match, every reader may judge for himself:

FIRST GAME.

(Begun by the New York Club.)

NEW YORK.

1. King's Pawn 2 sq.
2. K B to Q B 4th.
3. Q BP one.

4. K Kt. to K B 3d.
5. Q P one.
6. Q to K 2d.

7. K B to Q Kt. 3d. 8. Q B to K Kt. 5th. 9. Q B to KR 4th. 10. P retakes B.

11. Q Kt. to Q 2d.
12. B to K Kt. 3d.
13. K BP retakes Kt.
14. K Kt. to K R 4th.
15. QRP (doub.) one.
16. Q to KB 3d.
17. K R to K B.
18. KBP (doub.) one.
19. K R P one.
20. K Kt. P one.
21. K to Q.

22. K to QB 2d.

23. Q Kt. to Q Kt. 3d. 24. Q Kt. to QB 5th. 25. Q Kt. P one.

WASHINGTON.

The same.

The same.

Q to K 2d.

Q P one.

K Kt. to K B 3d.
Q B to K 3d.
Q Kt. to Q 2d.
KRP one.
B takes B.
Q to K 3d.

K Kt. to K R 4th.
Kt. takes B.
QRP one.
K Kt. P one.
B to Q R 2d
QBP one.
Castles with K R.
Q P one.
Q to K 2d.

Q R to Q.

Kt. to Q Kt. 3d.
Q R to Q 2d.
KR to Q.
QR to Q 3d.
QP takes K P.

SECOND GAME.

(Begun by the Washington Club.)

WASHINGTON.

1. K P 2.

2. K Kt. to K B 3d.

3. Q P 2.

4. K B to QB 4th.
5. Castles.

6. Q BP one.

7. K Kt. to K Kt, 5th.

8. K B to Q Kt 5th, ch.
9. K BP 2.

10. K B to Q B 4th.
11. K P one.

12. B takes K P.(doub.)
13. P retakes.
14. K Kt. to K 4th.
15. Q B to KB 4th.
16. Q to K B 3d.
17. K to K R.
18. Q Kt. to Q 2d.
19. Q Kt. to Q B 4th.
20. B retakes B.
21. B takes Kt.
22. B takes KB P.

NEW YORK.

The same.

Q Kt. to Q B 3d.

P takes P.
Q to K B 3d.

Q P one.

K P (doubled) one.
Q Kt. to K 4th.
Q BP one.

Q Kt. to K Kt. 5th.
Q Kt. to K R 3d.
Q home.
Q P takes K P.
KB to K 2d.

Q Kt. to K Kt. 5th.
KRP 2.

Q to Q Kt. 3d. ch.
Q B to K 3d.
Castles.

B takes Kt.
K Kt. to K R 3.
Q Kt. takes B.

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