The benighted policy of keeping in power a mawkish Sicilian Court, saturated with the incurable vices of cowardice, falsehood, dishonesty, and treachery, failed; and the Government of the day was saddled with the crime of squandering human life, wealth, and energy without receiving any commensurate return.  If it was in the national interest to involve the country in war with France, it could have been carried on with greater credit and effect by not undertaking the hopeless task of bolstering up a Court and a people that were openly described by our own people who were sent to fight for them as “odious damned cowards and villains.”  We had no real grounds of quarrel with France nor with her rulers.  The Revolution was their affair, and was no concern of ours, except in so far as it might harmfully reflect on us, and of this there was no likelihood if we left them alone.  The plea of taking the balance of power under our benevolent care was a sickly exhibition of statesmanship, and the assumption of electing ourselves guardians of the rights of small nations mere cant.  It was, in fact, the canker of jealousy and hatred on the part of the reactionary forces against a man, a principle, and a people.

Had those who governed this country then held aloof from the imbroglio created by the French Revolution, observed a watchful, conciliatory spirit of neutrality towards the French Government, and allowed the Continental Powers to adjust their own differences, the conditions of human existence and the hurtful administration of autocratic governments would have been reconstituted, and the world would have been the better for it; instead of which we helped to impose on Europe twenty years of slaughter and devastation.  Our dismal, plutocratic rulers, with solemn enthusiasm, plunged England with all her power and influence on the side of Prussia and her continental allies, and, in conjunction with the Holy Alliance, pledged themselves never to lay down arms until France was mutilated and the master-mind which ruled her beaten and dethroned.  Their task was long, costly, and gruesome.  What a ghastly legacy those aggressively righteous champions of international rights have bequeathed to the world!  But for their folly and frenzy we should not be engaged in a European war to-day.  Poor Napoleon!  He foreshadowed and used his gigantic genius to prevent it; now the recoil has come.  There are always more flies caught by treacle than by vinegar, a policy quite as efficacious in preventing international quarrels as it is in the smaller affairs of our existence, provided the law which governs the fitness of things is well defined.

Had we approached Napoleon in a friendly spirit and on equal terms, without haughty condescension, he would have reciprocated our cordiality and put proper value on our friendship.  By wisdom and tact the duration of Napoleon’s wars would have been vastly shortened, and both nations would have been saved from the errors that were committed.  We did not do this, and we are now reaping the consequence.  It is hardly to be expected that if hostility be shown towards an individual or a nation either will mildly submit to it.  Who can estimate the passionate resentment of an emotional people at Nelson’s constant declamatory outbursts against the French national character, and the effect it had throughout France?