Page:Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy, 1738-1914 - ed. Jones - 1914.djvu/289

in Ireland, and some of the prisoners having been taken and sent to Bermuda or Australia, that the Ministers of France, Holland, Belgium, or any other country had taken it into their heads to object to our treatment of those prisoners and to say, 'Don't treat them in that way. Give them their native Parliament on College Green—you are acting cruelly in sending them to Bermuda or Australia. I shall write home to France, I shall write home to Holland, I shall write home to Belgium; and depend upon it your conduct will raise such a ferment of execration and hatred against you, that the President of the Republic, the King of Holland, and the King of Belgium will be absolutely obliged to take notice of it.' How should we have received that intimation? I think with a horse-laugh, and there was no reason why the Neapolitan King should not receive that dispatch of Lord Napier's in the same way, except that he, no doubt, gave it good-naturedly a more polite and courteous reception. Now we thus presume to interfere with the domestic affairs of Naples as neither France nor Holland would dare interfere with ours, and as we never durst interfere with theirs. True, we never should dream of urging the great Republic to treat its rebellious subjects, when charged with treason, otherwise than as its Government pleased! True, Naples is a feebler Power than France! But is that all the ground for the proceeding? Is that all the warrant for reading lectures such as those we have read, for doing the things we have done, threatening the things we have threatened, claiming the right we have asserted of protecting criminals imprisoned for rebellion from the justice of their lawful