Well, then, there is another question, still more apposite, and in answer to which I think that we should have had some explanation, and it is, ’What shall be done, supposing that this army should attack Rome, and, as is most probable, carry it?’ Up to this hour I, for my part, do not know whether such a question has been put, or, if put, whether it has received an answer.  ’What are the French doing before Rome, and what will they be doing after they have gained possession of it?’ is the question that should have been put.

To say that they are there for the cause of humanity, or for the sake of maintaining the balance of power, these are words of which I cannot understand the connexion with the undenied facts, and with the march of 40,000 or 50,000 troops with 120 guns, which does require satisfactory explanation, because such proceedings are not an adjustment, but a subversion, a destruction of the European balance.  I must forget all that I have ever read of the rights of nations before I consent to admit that circumstances like these can be allowed to pass over unnoticed.  Here, my Lords, I should be doing injustice to my own feelings if I did not express my entire admiration of the conduct of the French army before the walls of Rome.  What the French army had to do there—­whether the French Government were entitled to send it thither—­is another matter, and on this men may have different opinions.  Whether or not it was in perfect consistency with the professions of the new half-fledged French Republic to send an army to put down another nascent, a newly-hatched republic, whether that step was in harmony with the views of the statesmen who had ruled France ever since the unhappy 24th of February—­a day which I must ever consider deplorable for the peace of Europe, for the institutions and thrones of Europe, and, above all, most unhappy for the improvement and tranquillity of France itself—­whether that step was in strict keeping with all the professions of all the parties who had been in power since that event had changed the face of France, and arrested the progress, the rapid, the uninterrupted progress, to comfort and happiness which France was making under the constitutional monarchy, by the development of her prodigious resources—­whether it was in harmony with their professions of peace to send an army to overthrow the infant Republic of Rome—­I will not stop now to inquire.  Suffice it to say, that the assistance of France was invited by the Pope, as he says in his allocution from Gaeta, but not severally or distinctly—­it was invited in conjunction with that of Austria, Spain, and Naples; and it is one of the very few criticisms which I am disposed to make upon the French Government, that the second difficulty in this question is the manner in which the French army went alone to Rome when the Pope asked them to come conjointly with the forces of the other Powers; for it, seemed as if they meant to anticipate others, and to gain a footing in Rome before the Austrians could take the field.