But, while all this is true, the instinctive aversion with which this act of Nelson’s has been regarded generally is well founded.  It was not decent, for it was not necessary, that capture should be followed so rapidly by trial, and condemnation by execution.  Neither time nor circumstances pressed.  The insurrection was over.  Except the siege of St. Elmo, hostilities near Naples were at an end.  That Caracciolo’s judges were naval officers who had recently been in action with him would be, with average military men, rather in the prisoner’s favor than otherwise; but it was very far from being in his favor that they were men in whom the angry passions engendered by civil warfare, and licentious spoliation, had not yet had time to cool.  Neither the judges nor the revising power allowed themselves space for reflection.  Nelson himself failed to sustain the dispassionate and magnanimous attitude that befitted the admiral of a great squadron, so placed as to have the happy chance to moderate the excesses which commonly follow the triumph of parties in intestine strife.  But, however he then or afterwards may have justified his course to his own conscience, his great offence was against his own people.  To his secondary and factitious position of delegate from the King of Naples, he virtually sacrificed the consideration due to his inalienable character of representative of the King and State of Great Britain.  He should have remembered that the act would appear to the world, not as that of the Neapolitan plenipotentiary, but of the British officer, and that his nation, while liable like others to bursts of unreasoning savagery, in its normal moods delights to see justice clothed in orderly forms, unstained by precipitation or suspicion of perversion, advancing to its ends with the majesty of law, without unseemly haste, providing things honest in the sight of all men.  That he did not do so, when he could have done so, has been intuitively felt; and to the instinctive resentment thus aroused among his countrymen has been due the facility with which the worst has been too easily believed.

Commander Jeaffreson Miles of the British Navy, writing in 1843, was one of the first, if not the very first, to clear effectually Nelson’s reputation from the stigma of treachery, and of submission to unworthy influences, at this time.  He has sought also to vindicate his hasty action in Caracciolo’s case, by citing the swift execution of two seamen by Lord St. Vincent, at a time when mutiny was threatening.  It cannot be denied that, for deterrent effect, punishment at times must be sudden as well as sharp; but the justification in each case rests upon attendant circumstances.  In the instances here compared, we have in the one a fleet in which many ships were seething with mutiny, and the preservation of order rested solely upon the firmness of one man,—­the commander-in-chief,—­and upon the awe inspired by him.  In the other, we see rebellion subdued, the chief rebels in confinement,