OUR NATIONAL REPUTATION.

From the Saturday Gazette. OUR NATIONAL REPUTATION. The United States is rapidly becoming the terror of the world. We are a nation of filibusters and colonizers of weaker nations, whose territories lie within range of our commerce or speculation. New Grenada is alarmed at the infusion of our population into her territories, and last, of all, the little republic of St. Domingo has been in a panic about a report, received by way of Turks Island, to the effect that an American steamer had put into Puerto Plata, but had fled on sight of an English steamer, and that this solitary steamer was bound to land a force that would take possession of the Dominican Republic and straightway annex it to the dominions of Uncle Sam. However absurd such a report might be made, it is wild to suppose that the government of the United States would sanction it, or shoulder the responsibility of it. It would rather have declared the whole affair illegal and outrageous, and done every thing to give up the lawless invaders to the justice of the injured government. That such would have been the result, we have an assurance in the policy laid down by our government, in various administrations, when similar troubles have been menacing us with Canada, Cuba and Mexico. But neither the declared policy nor the actual practice of a government can give confidence to foreign powers, so long as the shameless spirit of encroachment, annexation and revolution exists as it does among so large a portion of the American people. The lawlessness of a class inspires more faith than the promises of a President, and the reputation of the nation suffers for the shamelessness of a faction. Thus it is that every commercial enterprise that is set on foot in an American port is at once looked upon as a Fillibuster expedition in disguise. Cuba shakes in her shores at the sight of an American steamer; St. Domingo bars her doors on all foreigners, lest a stray American invader may come in and upset her government, and we shall next hear that Soulouque, the supreme, the Emperor of Hayti, drawing a cordon across his land frontier and fortifying his ports, to prevent his Imperial domains from being carried off bodily to be annexed to the great American Republic. While we can laugh at the folly of these foreign fears, we cannot help lamenting that the name of the United States should have fallen into such an odium as to justify, in the slightest degree, such absurd alarms. But, thanks to the oft-repeated and shameless enterprises upon cuba and the Rio Grande, the government of the republic fought for by the fathers, and identified in all honor by Washington and those around him, has now come to be looked on as a species of piratical craft cruising in all seas, and ready to plunder and capture all foreign property. It is beginning to be a sort of national Rob Roy, whose policy is '—the simple plan, That they shall take who have the power, And they shall keep who can.' Right-minded citizens, who respect national honesty and deem acts of national wrong as shameful as pocket-picking, should set their faces against all movements that may tend to strengthen the opprobrium into which we have fallen among foreign governments. The mere fact of our being a nation of unexampled prosperity, and rapidly growing in wealth and power, should not satisfy us, so long as we are looked upon abroad as a lawless people, with a government incapable of checking the growing popular frenzy for annexation. There is something more than mere power and wealth to be attained by a nation—and that is the reputation as well as the fact of national integrity.