part in or aiding such unlawful proceedings, and the proper civil, military, and naval officers were directed to take all necessary measures for the enforcement of the laws.  The expedition failed, but it has not been without its painful consequences.  Some of our citizens who, it was alleged, were engaged in the expedition were captured, and have been brought to trial as for a capital offense in the Province of Canada.  Judgment and sentence of death have been pronounced against some, while others have been acquitted.  Fully believing in the maxim of government that severity of civil punishment for misguided persons who have engaged in revolutionary attempts which have disastrously failed is unsound and unwise, such representations have been made to the British Government in behalf of the convicted persons as, being sustained by an enlightened and humane judgment, will, it is hoped, induce in their cases an exercise of clemency and a judicious amnesty to all who were engaged in the movement.  Counsel has been employed by the Government to defend citizens of the United States on trial for capital offenses in Canada, and a discontinuance of the prosecutions which were instituted in the courts of the United States against those who took part in the expedition has been directed.

I have regarded the expedition as not only political in its nature, but as also in a great measure foreign from the United States in its causes, character, and objects.  The attempt was understood to be made in sympathy with an insurgent party in Ireland, and by striking at a British Province on this continent was designed to aid in obtaining redress for political grievances which, it was assumed, the people of Ireland had suffered at the hands of the British Government during a period of several centuries.  The persons engaged in it were chiefly natives of that country, some of whom had, while others had not, become citizens of the United States under our general laws of naturalization.  Complaints of misgovernment in Ireland continually engage the attention of the British nation, and so great an agitation is now prevailing in Ireland that the British Government have deemed it necessary to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in that country.  These circumstances must necessarily modify the opinion which we might otherwise have entertained in regard to an expedition expressly prohibited by our neutrality laws.  So long as those laws remain upon our statute books they should be faithfully executed, and if they operate harshly, unjustly, or oppressively Congress alone can apply the remedy by their modification or repeal.

Political and commercial interests of the United States are not unlikely to be affected in some degree by events which are transpiring in the eastern regions of Europe, and the time seems to have come when our Government ought to have a proper diplomatic representation in Greece.