wing faults to have
been committed by those who produced them or by their agents, we may
assume that, if the whole of the papers were given, not a few more
faults of the same kind would be found to have been committed.

The noble Lord opposite (Lord Minto) went from Rome to Naples, and if
he had been alone there I should have had greater confidence in the
proceedings of the Government, for I have had long experience of his
good sense, and sound judgement. But the noble Earl had a very active
and zealous man under him; and while wading through this volume I
have often had occasion to reflect upon the wise opinion of Prince
Talleyrand, who used to reckon in diplomacy that zeal in young men is
the next thing to treachery, and that sometimes it is just as bad as
treachery, for the zealous are clothed with the garb of merit, and you
have little hold over them. Well, the zeal, the honest zeal, no doubt,
of Lord Napier, moved my noble kinsman from Rome to Naples. The noble
Earl (Earl Minto) on the 2nd of February, 1848, wrote to the Foreign
Office, that he had been so urged by Lord Napier to go to Naples that
he had resolved to set off. But Lord Napier also tells us that on the
3rd of February he had an interview with the King of the Two Sicilies,
and that he got the King, out of his zeal and his address working with
it, to ask Lord Minto to go to Naples. Well, my noble friend and Lord
Napier, representing the British Government, were decidedly for the
Sicilians and against the Neapolitans. There was no attempt to hold
the balance even between the two parties, but every expression was
used, every proposal made, every captious objection taken in favour
of the Sicilians under pretence of holding even the balance. In that
country my noble kinsman and Lord Napier are what we term in the
language of this country 'Repealers'. They are all for what they call
a native and independent parliament in Sicily, just as the Repealers
are for a native and independent Parliament in College Green. The
noble Lord (Lord Minto) says, in a very vehement manner, that the
sufferings of the people of Sicily under their thirty years' tyranny
were so intolerable that the Sicilians had a much better ground for
their rebellion than we had against James II in 1688. A consul,
writing on the 24th of April, having given most flourishing accounts
of the universal insurrection of the Sicilians (accounts which differ
entirely from those I received from traveller