the insurrection for above half a year.  Talk of your humanity!  Boast of your Admiral and his French associate interposing to save bloodshed!  Whose fault was it that Catania, having profited by the respite you forced the King to grant, still held out, instead of opening her gates as soon as Messina had fallen, when the insurrection must have been crushed in its cradle?  Who but your commanders and envoys are to blame for the necessity under which they placed the King’s troops of fighting a battle on the 6th of April?  That engagement no doubt put down the insurrection; but many lives were lost in it.  Five-and-twenty officers were killed and wounded on the King’s side, and some hundreds of men must likewise have expiated their loyalty with their lives, to say nothing of the insurgent loss.  Palermo fell without a struggle, after all the boastings of your envoys and captains, and consuls and vice-consuls.  Would she have resisted more fiercely in September?  The insurgent chiefs fled, and got on board the Vectis, one of the two vessels of war which you suffered the Sicilian rebels to fit out in your ports, when you refused all help to your ancient friend’s ambassador in checking this outrage on the law of nations, and when by a celebrated ‘inadvertence’ you suffered those rebels to obtain from the Tower a supply of arms, wherewith to fight your ally’s armies.

My Lords, I cannot trust myself with the expression of the feelings which are roused by the whole of the papers, to which I have only referred occasionally; they are the feelings with which all men of sound principles and calm judgement will read them all over Europe.  I will refer to them no further than to read the indignant denial which the veteran General Filangieri, Prince of Satriano, gives to the charge of cruelty brought against his gallant and loyal army by our envoys and our consuls, and, I grieve to add, our naval commanders.  (Lord Brougham here read the vehement, and even impassioned, terms in which the General refutes these foul calumnies, charging him, an officer of above half a century’s service, with suffering his troops to commit enormities which no military man, of however little experience in his profession, could have permitted.)

Rely upon it, my Lords, that if anything can make more offensive the conduct of our agents in fostering revolt, and injuring the lawful government of our allies, it is the adding foul slander to gross indiscretion, revenging themselves on those whose valour and conduct has frustrated their designs, by blackening their characters, and committing that last act of cruel injustice, calumniating those you have injured, through your hatred of those to whom you have given good cause to hate you.