Page:Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy, 1738-1914 - ed. Jones - 1914.djvu/259

 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.