Until this be propitiated or satisfied, it is vain for power to talk either of triumphs or of repose.  No matter what fields are desolated, what fortresses surrendered, what armies subdued, or what provinces overrun.  In the history of the year that has passed by us, and in the instance of unhappy Spain, we have seen the vanity of all triumphs in a cause which violates the general sense of justice of the civilized world.  It is nothing that the troops of France have passed from the Pyrenees to Cadiz; it is nothing that an unhappy and prostrate nation has fallen before them; it is nothing that arrests, and confiscation, and execution, sweep away the little remnant of national resistance.  There is an enemy that still exists to check the glory of these triumphs.  It follows the conqueror back to the very scene of his ovations; it calls upon him to take notice that Europe, though silent, is yet indignant; it shows him that the sceptre of his victory is a barren sceptre; that it shall confer neither joy nor honor, but shall moulder to dry ashes in his grasp.  In the midst of his exultation, it pierces his ear with the cry of injured justice; it denounces against him the indignation of an enlightened and civilized age; it turns to bitterness the cup of his rejoicing, and wounds him with the sting which belongs to the consciousness of having outraged the opinion of mankind.

In my opinion, Sir, the Spanish nation is now nearer, not only in point of time, but in point of circumstance, to the acquisition of a regulated government, than at the moment of the French invasion.  Nations must, no doubt, undergo these trials in their progress to the establishment of free institutions.  The very trials benefit them, and render them more capable both of obtaining and of enjoying the object which they seek.

I shall not detain the committee, Sir, by laying before it any statistical, geographical, or commercial account of Greece.  I have no knowledge on these subjects which is not common to all.  It is universally admitted, that, within the last thirty or forty years, the condition of Greece has been greatly improved.  Her marine is at present respectable, containing the best sailors in the Mediterranean, better even, in that sea, than our own, as more accustomed to the long quarantines and other regulations which prevail in its ports.  The number of her seamen has been estimated as high as 50,000, but I suppose that estimate must be much too large.  She has, probably, 150,000 tons of shipping.  It is not easy to ascertain the amount of the Greek population.  The Turkish government does not trouble itself with any of the calculations of political economy, and there has never been such a thing as an accurate census, probably, in any part of the Turkish empire.  In the absence of all official information, private opinions widely differ.  By the tables which have been communicated, it would seem that there are 2,400,000 Greeks in Greece proper and the islands; an amount, as I am inclined to think, somewhat overrated.  There are, probably, in the whole of European Turkey, 5,000,000 Greeks, and 2,000,000 more in the Asiatic dominions of that power.