touching France are now at an end, for
no Government, no army, could have acted more blamelessly--I should
rather say, more admirably--than that French army and its commanders.
In the first place, can any man doubt that they could have taken Rome
long ago if they had not been averse to the effusion of blood? Little
do they know the gallantry of French troops who entertain a contrary
notion. Then they were strongly impressed with the idea that it was
not right the innocent should suffer with the guilty. Again, they felt
that they were not going against the Romans, but against those who had
usurped and exercised an intolerable tyranny over the Romans, properly
so called. They were marching against Mazzini and Garibaldi, that
Garibaldi for whom a noble friend of mine (Lord Howden), whose eulogy
is really praise, bespoke your sympathy so strongly a few evenings
ago. But my noble friend, perhaps, is not aware that this person--a
clever man, undoubtedly, of great military talents--was, like Mazzini,
a professional conspirator; that the object of his first plot was,
like that of a great conspirator in our own country (Guy Fawkes), who
was not, however, quite so popular, to blow up the Royal Family of
Sardinia in the theatre of Genoa; and that the discovery of that
gunpowder plot drove him out in exile, first to Brazil, and afterwards
to the Rio Plata, where he began to act as a partisan, and afterwards
acquired considerable influence. On the breaking out of the last
revolution in France he returned to Europe, and shortly afterwards
agitated the provinces of Italy, repeating in their northern
districts, and in Rome itself, those valorous feats of arms which
gained him reputation in the New World. Mazzini is a man of less
courage, though of great ability, for few men are so bold as
Garibaldi; but Mazzini, in conjunction with Garibaldi, got possession
of Rome, the one eminent for his civil, the other from his military
qualifications. There they established a dictatorship under the name
of a Triumvirate, and disciplined several thousand soldiers, of whom
scarcely one was a native Roman. Among them were Frenchmen, Monte
Videans, Poles, Italians of the north, but Romans few or none.
Therefore it was, I said, that General Oudinot was cautious how he
bombarded Rome, as he could not direct his hostility against one class
of men, and yet entirely spare all. Lastly, my Lords, I cannot shut my
eyes to the merits of the French army, of whi