s me great satisfaction,
seeing that I have to express a difference of opinion from my
noble friends opposite, and to blame the measures which they have
adopted,--it gives me great satisfaction, I say, to commence what I am
about to state, by declaring my entire approval of such sentiments as
I am about to cite, in language far better than my own, used by them
when they instructed our envoy at the Court of the Two Sicilies to
give the 'strongest assurance of the earnest desire of the British
Government to draw, if possible, still closer the bonds of friendship
which had so long united the crowns of Great Britain and the Two
Sicilies'. It is therefore grateful, most grateful to me--whilst I
join in their sentiments, which are better expressed than I could
have expressed them, but not more warmly expressed than I would have
expressed them--that, in the remarks which I am about to make, and
which are wrung from me by the accusations brought against the
Ministers, the authorities, and the troops of Naples, I shall, in the
true sense of the passage I have just quoted, have to defend those
Ministers, those authorities, and those troops from attacks which
have been made upon them by the authors of that passage injuriously,
inconsiderately, and unjustly.

The dispatch to which I have just alluded, is dated December 16, 1847.
But, somehow or other, events happened soon after which make it hardly
possible to suppose that the same hand which wrote that dispatch,
could have written the subsequent instructions, or that the same
agents who had to obey the former instructions, and to represent the
feelings of old attachment, of which it was impossible to draw the
bonds closer, could have been instructed so soon afterwards as January
18, 1848, to take a course entirely and diametrically opposite.

It would give me great satisfaction if, having thus accidentally
touched upon the transactions of Southern Italy, I could proceed at
once thither in the progress on which I am now asking your Lordships
to accompany me. But I find, my Lords, from what has been taking place
within the last few weeks, how reluctant so ever I may be to discuss
the events of the northern divisions of Italy, and recur to questions
often agitated here, and by none of your Lordships more ably than by
the noble Earl near me (Lord Aberdeen), that I must allude to the
conduct of his late Sardinian Majesty, to the still unfinished
negotiations between Sardinia and Aust