lance of power, these are words of which I cannot
understand the connexion with the undenied facts, and with the
march of 40,000 or 50,000 troops with 120 guns, which does require
satisfactory explanation, because such proceedings are not an
adjustment, but a subversion, a destruction of the European balance. I
must forget all that I have ever read of the rights of nations before
I consent to admit that circumstances like these can be allowed to
pass over unnoticed. Here, my Lords, I should be doing injustice to my
own feelings if I did not express my entire admiration of the conduct
of the French army before the walls of Rome. What the French army had
to do there--whether the French Government were entitled to send
it thither--is another matter, and on this men may have different
opinions. Whether or not it was in perfect consistency with the
professions of the new half-fledged French Republic to send an army to
put down another nascent, a newly-hatched republic, whether that step
was in harmony with the views of the statesmen who had ruled France
ever since the unhappy 24th of February--a day which I must ever
consider deplorable for the peace of Europe, for the institutions and
thrones of Europe, and, above all, most unhappy for the improvement
and tranquillity of France itself--whether that step was in strict
keeping with all the professions of all the parties who had been in
power since that event had changed the face of France, and arrested
the progress, the rapid, the uninterrupted progress, to comfort and
happiness which France was making under the constitutional monarchy,
by the development of her prodigious resources--whether it was in
harmony with their professions of peace to send an army to overthrow
the infant Republic of Rome--I will not stop now to inquire. Suffice
it to say, that the assistance of France was invited by the Pope,
as he says in his allocution from Gaeta, but not severally or
distinctly--it was invited in conjunction with that of Austria, Spain,
and Naples; and it is one of the very few criticisms which I am
disposed to make upon the French Government, that the second
difficulty in this question is the manner in which the French army
went alone to Rome when the Pope asked them to come conjointly with
the forces of the other Powers; for it, seemed as if they meant to
anticipate others, and to gain a footing in Rome before the Austrians
could take the field.

But all my unfavourable remarks