joint character from being affixed to the war—­if war there must be—­with Spain; to take care that the war should not grow out of an assumed jurisdiction of the Congress; to keep within reasonable bounds that predominating areopagitical spirit, which the memorandum of the British Cabinet of May, 1820, describes as ’beyond the sphere of the original conception, and understood principles of the alliance’,—­’an alliance never intended as a union for the government of the world, or for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other States.’  And this, I say, was accomplished.

With respect to Verona, then, what remains of accusation against the Government?  It has been charged, not so much that the object of the Government was amiss, as that the negotiations were conducted in too low a tone.  But the case was obviously one in which a high tone might have frustrated the object.  I beg, then, of the House, before they proceed to adopt an Address which exhibits more of the ingenuity of philologists than of the policy of statesmen—­before they found a censure of the Government for its conduct in negotiations of transcendent practical importance, upon refinements of grammatical nicety—­I beg that they will at least except from the proposed censure, the transactions at Verona, where I think I have shown that a tone of reproach and invective was unnecessary, and, therefore, would have been misplaced.

Among those who have made unjust and unreasonable objections to the tone of our representations at Verona, I should be grieved to include the honourable member for Bramber (Mr. Wilberforce), with whose mode of thinking I am too well acquainted not to be aware that his observations are founded on other and higher motives than those of political controversy.  My honourable friend, through a long and amiable life, has mixed in the business of the world without being stained by its contaminations:  and he, in consequence, is apt to place—­I will not say too high, but higher, I am afraid, than the ways of the world will admit, the standard of political morality.  I fear my honourable friend is not aware how difficult it is to apply to politics those pure, abstract principles which are indispensable to the excellence of private ethics.  Had we employed in the negotiations that serious moral strain which he might have been more inclined to approve, many of the gentlemen opposed to me would, I doubt not, have complained, that we had taken a leaf from the book of the Holy Alliance itself; that we had framed in their own language a canting protest against their purposes, not in the spirit of sincere dissent, but the better to cover our connivance.  My honourable friend, I admit, would not have been of the number of those who would so have accused us:  but he may be assured that he would have been wholly disappointed in the practical result of our didactic reprehensions.  In truth, the principle of non-interference is one on which we were already irrecoverably at variance in