How can we discuss with fairness, I might say with common sense, any transactions, unless in reference to the object which was in the view of those who carried them on?  I repeat it, whether gentlemen in this House do or do not consider the question to be one of peace or war, the Ministers could not take a single step in the late negotiations, till they had well weighed that question; till they had determined what direction ought to be given to those negotiations, so far as that question was concerned.  We determined that it was our duty, in the first instance, to endeavour to preserve peace if possible for all the world:  next, to endeavour to preserve peace between the nations whose pacific relations appeared most particularly exposed to hazard; and failing in this, to preserve at all events peace for this country; but a peace consistent with the good faith, the interests, and the honour of the nation.

I am far from intending to assert that our decision in this respect is not a fit subject of examination.  Undoubtedly the conduct of the Government is liable to a twofold trial.  First, was the object of Ministers a right object?  Secondly, did they pursue it in a right way?  The first of these questions, whether Ministers did right in aiming at the preservation of peace, I postpone.  I will return to the consideration of it hereafter.  My first inquiry is as to the merits or demerits of the negotiations:  and, in order to enter into that inquiry, I must set out with assuming, for the time, that peace is the object which we ought to have pursued.

With this assumption, I proceed to examine, whether the papers on the table show that the best means were employed for attaining the given object?  If the object was unfit, there is an end of any discussion as to the negotiations;—­they must necessarily be wrong from the beginning to the end; it is only in reference to their fitness for the end proposed, that the papers themselves can be matter worthy of discussion.

In reviewing, then, the course of these negotiations, as directed to maintain, first, the peace of Europe; secondly, the peace between France and Spain; and lastly, peace for this country, they divide themselves naturally into three heads:—­first, the negotiations at Verona; secondly, those with France; and thirdly, those with Spain.  Of each of these in their order.

I say, emphatically, in their order; because there can be no greater fallacy than that which has pervaded the arguments of many honourable gentlemen, who have taken up expressions used in one stage of these negotiations, and applied them to another.  An honourable baronet (Sir F. Burdett), for instance, who addressed the House last night, employed—­or, I should rather say, adopted—­a fallacy of this sort, with respect to an expression of mine in the extract of a dispatch to the Duke of Wellington, which stands second in the first series of papers.  It is but just to the honourable baronet to admit that his observation