In the name of this fraternal spirit, we see the great Napoleon surrounded by a hotbed of assassins demanding his life in the name of the Founder of our faith.  He was the ruler, as I have said, of a vast Empire, sworn to protect its laws, its dignity, and its citizen rights by defending himself and his country against either treachery, plotters against his life, or open enemies, no matter from what quarter they came.  The Duc d’Enghien violated the law, and was therefore as liable to suffer the consequences as any peasant or middle-class person would have been.  But this did not meet with the approval of the international oligarchy, so they set up a screaming factory and blared this murderous deed into the minds of all the Western world.  These fervent professors of the Christian faith were in no way particular as to the form or authenticity of their declamatory ebullitions.

But what of Nelson?  He was a subject of his King, employed by the King’s Government under certain plenary powers to fight the country’s battles, defend its right, uphold its dignity, guard its honour, and commit no violence.  That is, in plain English, he was to play the game.  But he assumed an authority that no Government of England would have dared to have given him by revoking the word of honour of a distinguished officer who had pledged England’s word that the lives of the beleaguered men would be spared.  I think the writer of the gospel of “Let brotherly love continue,” and the rhetoricians who claim that Britons have no competitors in the science of moral rectitude, will have a hard task to square the unworthy declamations against Napoleon’s responsibility in the Duc d’Enghien affair with their silence on Nelson’s in breaking the truce already referred to, and the awful consequences set forth in Mr. Fox’s speech, which is reminiscent of the powerful disciplinary methods of that manly martinet Ivan the Terrible, who was responsible for the massacre of men by the thousand, flaying of prisoners alive, collecting pyramids of skulls, slaughtering of innocent men, and the free use of other ingenious forms of refined scientific torture which tires the spirit to relate.  It is hard to forgive Nelson for having smirched his own and England’s name with atrocities so terrible.  But more humiliating still to British honour is the fact that his part in the breaking of the treaty was dictated to him from the quarter deck of the Foudroyant by a woman whom my vocabulary is unable to describe in fitting terms.  I shall emphasize this masculine female’s orders to Nelson by quoting them again.  Were it not for the comic impertinence of the order, I think it would almost make me feel the bitterness of death.  Nelson seems to have been the victim of her dominating spirit, though the evidence in support of him swallowing the whole dose of medicine is quite feeble.  That he swallowed too much of it will always detract from his fame.  “Haul down the flag of truce, Bronte.  No truce with rebels.”  Nelson lost a great opportunity of adding romance to his naval glory by neglecting his imperative duty in not putting Sir William Hamilton’s wife in irons or having her thrown into the sea.  A story of this kind would have sounded better, and its effect would have electrified the world in subsequent days, and have given scope to the talents of actors and authors who are eager for dramatic copy.