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(Prom the John Bull.)

(From the Globe.)

PEACE OR WAR.

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PEACE OR WAR. (From the Britannia.) The question of peace or war remains as it was. The French journals vary from hour to hour, and one day breathe flame and cannon-balls against En- gland, and in the next are disposed to think that she has been only foolish, and that she may be for- given upon due acknowledgement of her absurdity. Next week we shall probably have a new discovery, that the Tyrant of the Seas,"—for so the French spirit of old metaphor persists in calling a country which has scarcely a ship,—must be humbled for ever and then the national glory will be in every man's mouth, until the stock-jobbers have gained their point, and France is to suffer us to live. With such a na- tion it is impossible to live with any degree of secu- riay, except by showing that we are ready to make war a dangerous game to her. Are we in a situation to do this is the point; and if we are not, whose is the crime, and whose ought to be the punishment ? What is the state of things at this moment ? If not war, what was so ever near war ? MEHEMET Ar,r's army is on the northern frontier of Syria to the number of 170,000 men, ready to pour down into Asia Minor. Commodore NAPIER, with a British squadron, is on the coast blockading Beyrout, and threatening a bombardment, which threat IBRAHIM PACHA answers by declaring, that, on the first shot, he will set fire to the town, and repel a landing by urms. MKHEMET ALI has another army of 40,000 men in Alexandria, and declares he will resist a landing to the last drop of his blood. Admiral STOPFORD has a squadron blockading Alexandria and capturing its merchantmen. On the north, Russia has a force of a hundred thousand men on the borders of the Black Sea, ready to follow a fleet of twelve or fourteen sail of heavy line-of-battle ships to Constantinople in five days: and another army, at the head of the Black Sea, ready to pour down into Asia Minor at the tap of the drum. The Turks have 30,000 troops on their march for Constantinople, are fortifying the Bosphorus, and are sending off arms to the mountaineers of Lebanon. The French are still building hundred-gun ships crowding them with the naval conscription, and sending them up the Mediterranean as fast as they are built. If all this does not look like the prepara- tive for hostilities, it is impossible to think that any such thing as war ever existed. In England, it must be confessed, all seems sufficiently pacific. Ministers are gone, like the waverers and wanderers of holy writ, "some to their farm, some to their merchandize some to sketch tours for the publishing season, and some to recover their faded bloom, after the suppers and dances of the spring some to do nothing and all to be unheard-of, disregarded, and useless, as if they had never existed. We do not say that war must take place. There is no valid ground for it. Common sense, common humanity, and all the higher interests of mankind, are against it. The great BURKE said, long since, that war for national aggrandizement or commercial opulence was not more a crime than it was a folly that, as to territory, it purchases a province at the price which might have renovated an empire: and that, as to wealth, it buys ten thousand hogsheads of sugar at ten thousand times their price. We admit that if sovereigns, nations, and men were all high- principled, or even capable of exercising a sound judgment, or, still less, of obeying the common in- stincts of humanity, the name of war would be un- known. But what is the frenzy of sovereigns, the avarice of nations, and the insensibility of men, with fame, gold, or power before them P Europe would be mad to go to war but who shall answer for her being rational an hour?

(Prom the John Bull.)