of France, Holland, Belgium, or any other country had taken it into their heads to object to our treatment of those prisoners and to say, ’Don’t treat them in that way.  Give them their native Parliament on College Green—­you are acting cruelly in sending them to Bermuda or Australia.  I shall write home to France, I shall write home to Holland, I shall write home to Belgium; and depend upon it your conduct will raise such a ferment of execration and hatred against you, that the President of the Republic, the King of Holland, and the King of Belgium will be absolutely obliged to take notice of it.’  How should we have received that intimation?  I think with a horse-laugh, and there was no reason why the Neapolitan King should not receive that dispatch of Lord Napier’s in the same way, except that he, no doubt, gave it good-naturedly a more polite and courteous reception.  Now we thus presume to interfere with the domestic affairs of Naples as neither France nor Holland would dare interfere with ours, and as we never durst interfere with theirs.  True, we never should dream of urging the great Republic to treat its rebellious subjects, when charged with treason, otherwise than as its Government pleased!  True, Naples is a feebler Power than France!  But is that all the ground for the proceeding?  Is that all the warrant for reading lectures such as those we have read, for doing the things we have done, threatening the things we have threatened, claiming the right we have asserted of protecting criminals imprisoned for rebellion from the justice of their lawful Sovereign?  I say that to a generous nation, to a manly feeling heart, to a person of true British honour and true British gallantry, it is the very reverse of a reason, and makes our conduct the less excusable as it ought to be the more hateful.

But far from words being all we used, far from interfering by requisition and remonstrance being all we did, the British diplomacy and the British Navy were actually compelled to force an armistice upon the Neapolitan Government on behalf of its revolted subjects, and when their revolt was nearly quelled!  After Messina had been completely subdued, its forces routed, its walls crumbled, its strongest place captured, our Admiral, having a fleet in those waters, was resolved it should not be there for nothing.  Hitherto he and his captains had only expressed sympathy with the insurgents, and hatred or contempt of their lawful Sovereign.  Now that the rebellion was on the point of being put down, by the capture of Catania and Palermo, which, but for us, must both have immediately fallen, now that the last hope of subverting the Throne of Sicily and installing a usurper on its ruins was about to vanish from the eyes of the British seamen, our Admiral, acting in concert no doubt with the British envoy, and inspired with the feelings of our Foreign Office, required a respite to be allowed the insurgents, and determined to back his requisition with his ships.