WHEN the Prince Rupert of debate made onslaught upon the Premier, on the first night of the December Session, he must have charged the foe under some impulse of that reckless valour which disdains the calmer action of judgment and memory. The well-known achievements of Lord Palmerston, in the management of our foreign relations, tempted Lord Derby to comment, not without humour, and amidst the laughter of the peers, upon the tone of melancholy resignation which the Prime Minister had succeeded in breathing into the paragraph of her Majesty's speech, which announced that profound peace reigned-or, shall we say raged over our connexion with European sovereigns. That blessing-unless we read calamity-the Premier, said Lord Derby, had done his best to avert. At all events the prevailing quiet was a matter of which he (Lord Palmerston) seemed to desire to wash his hands. And in the Commons, Mr. Disraeli, by a coincidence of sentiment and expression going far to justify Lord Granville's complaint of the non-spontaneity of the jest, taxed the noble Viscount opposite with conveying by the mouth of her Majesty, to the House and the country-"We have done our best; but there is no help, we are in for it ;-Europe is at peace!"

Now, far be it from us to deny the unquestionable genius Lord Palmerston has displayed in dealing with European diplomatic arrangements in a brisk, jaunty, overweening manner. Under ordinary circumstances, we readily admit, it would be hard, indeed, for any taunt which might be thrown from any side of either House upon such a matter, not to find between the joints of the Premier's harness room enough to lodge itself. On the occasion in question, however, we conceive him to be cased, for once, in armour of proof. Conscious of integrity, no doubt, he disdained so much as to handle his shield, and would not condescend to utter a phrase which would have blunted the point of the sarcasm :-"What! I, indeed, trouble peace in Europe by an over

bearing arrogance! Pray, sirs, remember King Bomba and the stokers of the steamship Cagliari !" We wonder whether these luckless engineering "Cives Romani," were, as members of their respective mechanics' institutes at Glasgow, Gateshead, or elsewhere, diligent conners of Parliamentary reports in the good old times when that magnificent platitude elicited, upon the Greek debate, the thundering sympathy of the House of Commons. Can it, by any strange freak of Fate, be possible that any one of them chanced then to have been a member of the famous vestry deputation from Islington, whose animating presence within the dusty official salons of the Foreign Office, roused the fervid eloquence of the noble Viscount to that burst of indignant oratory touching the struggles of continental nations for liberty, whereof the climax was the declaration of their crying need for the assistance of "a judicious bottleholder?" If it were so, indeed, how strange and unaccountable must have appeared to them their long detention in a most foul prison, whilst they perpended the fact, which should have been so consolatory, that the destinies of the whole Civitas Romana were now swayed by the fiery champion who had threatened, as avenger of Don Pacifico's rifled bedsteads and cupboards, to lay the Piræus in ashes, and had caused the "young Nero" of Austria to tremble at the bare thought of Hungary returning to the scratch, with Palmerston for a backer. "It is true," they might have reasoned,

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with the august and beloved Ferdinand, under whose lock and key we are temporarily confined, unhappy England has ceased to hold official communication. A very sudden and unexpected turn it was which brought us here at all. Our compulsory stoking, under threat of Mazzinian knives; our involuntary descent upon the coast of astonished Bombadom; our fatal capture by the gallant navy of that loyal realm; our undesirable personal introduction to the amenities of that paternally corrective gaol discipline, about which Mr. Gladstone

had the bad taste to publish scurrilous pamphlets; all these things are the phases of a rapid catastrophe, whereof, perchance-O bitter chance for us not even an echo has yet resounded within the walls of Downing-street. Yes! let us be patient and strong; stiff in determination as a piston-rod; continent of complaint as a double plated boiler of heat. When Palmerston hears, Palmerston will help."

But, as the weeks went on, misgivings and doubts arose :-"British ambassador, there is none at Naples; British consul there may be, having perhaps, however, other fish to fry; but sure as steam is steam, there must be at Naples our own correspondent' of the Times! At Naples, indeed! Why, ten to one, the fat old friar who waddled down to see the liberators land at Ponza, and the lanky individual with a straw hat and telescope, who watched us from the shore as the Neapolitan man-ofwar worked us in for a prize to harbour; and the slouching, squinting, hunchback lazzarone, who took a sight at us as we were marched, handcuffed, on shore, were each and all, that one and the same marvellous and ubiquitous Correspondent, assuming various disguises in the conscientious pursuit of his search after early, exclusive, and authentic information. Downing-street must know our fate but too well before this; and Palmerston must plead ignorance in vain." Seriously, and the matter, we fear, has had for one, at least, of our unfortunate countrymen consequences so serious as to give it a very grave aspect; we cannot bring ourselves to imagine upon what grounds that large section of the Liberal party in England, which flings up its cap and hurrahs when Lord Palmerston opens his mouth upon continental affairs, can justify to themselves his lamblike meekness in this misadventure of the hapless Englishmen, whom the capture of the Genoese steamer Cagliari, has thrown into the clutches of the torturers of Carlo Poërio. We could have forgiven Lord Palmerston an honest outburst, even of indiscreet zeal, against the treatment of the English mechanics of whom we speak. At Constantinople, at Smyrna, throughout the Levant, we refuse to let so much as one of the motley

rabble of Maltese and Ionians, whose misconduct is the continual despair of harassed consuls and vice-consuls, and the continual disgrace of the name of British citizenship, fall into the dismal discomforts of Eastern dungeons; yet we maintain with the Sultan, from whose criminal jurisdiction we subtract these choice samples of conventional British citizenship, the closest and most friendly diplomatic relations. Whereas, having solemnly, in the face of Europe, and in common with our most powerful ally, declared his Neapolitan Majesty to be, for his despotic and shameless treatment of his own unhappy subjects, unworthy to be honoured by the presence of a French or English ambassador at his court, we are fully content to let him immure within his pestilent prisondens-apparently for an indefinite period-native British citizens, whose offence against the laws of his realm there are not two men in Europe who would not pronounce to be an involuntary act.

The worthiness and consistency of such a course we are incapable of understanding. If, indeed, there were reasonable ground of hope that this unusual forbearance were any proof that his Lordship had turned over a new leaf in respect of his treatment of minor foreign powers, we should discern in the case a ray of consolation, and we should take comfort from the bare fact of such turning over of a new leaf at all.

But, in honest truth, our belief in the thorough-going nature of the amendment of Lord Palmerston's tone in diplomatic relations, is about as profound and sincere as our conviction of his genuine attachment to that cause of the extension of the franchise, which he has bound himself over to plead in the forthcoming Session.

Yet, we must own, that the tender respect shown to the independent sovereignty and legal rights of the Neapolitan monarch, in this matter of the imprisoned engineers, hardly commands our undivided sympathy. No! we have some little portion of that priceless commodity to share with the misguided mechanics of Sheffield, Hull, Newcastle, and other such hotbeds of perverse opinions, who have intimated an unreasonable impatience and unaccountable disgust at the re

cital of the sufferings of their fellowcraftsmen; and, as they would simply express themselves, "at the pretty figure the country cuts" at Naples. Poor Neapolitans !-to lose sight of the feelings of our own estimable and injured stokers a little while-it is not without a curious interest to speculate what may be the manner and fashion of their meditations upon the unusual event. If the “retentissement" of Mr. Gladstone's celebrated papers throughout Europe; if the minacious articles of the Times, at intervals, against the "adorato sovrano;" if the friendly, but futile, palaver of the Paris Conferences, had ever caused the hope to germinate in their oppressed souls that England might some day interpose to ease them of their yoke, or mollify its severity, their paternal ruler himself could scarcely have hit upon a more drastic purgative of such foul humours from the body of their thought.

There is about King Bomba a certain heroic bearing in hazardous conjunctures which gives him a sort of greatness, which even we, snubbed Britons, must admire. We have no doubt that the royal pupil of the Jesuits has an insight into character sufficiently penetrating to have enabled him, long since, to detect what the worthy Protestant vestrymen of Islington have not as yet been privileged to discern-we mean the feebleness of action, which, after all, has been, in the face of any firm resistance, so remarkable a feature of our blustering school of foreign politicians. His Neapolitan Majesty, no doubt, knew well enough, that, if Civis Romanus stood alone, face to face with him, the set stare of even an impudent lazzarone had a fair chance of looking him

down.

Ulcers wrought by chains upon the loins; tubercles, caused by the damp of fetid vaults, within the lungs of Neapolitans born and bred, of men who had sat and spoken and voted in a free Neapolitan parliament, of men who had been the cabinet ministers of a constitutional Neapolitan kingdom, these, indeed, were admirable catechetical lessons to his subjects upon his own unquestionable rights, and their indisputable duties. In so far as regarded caution as to the dangers and hopelessness of aiming, by themselves alone, after any different political and

social status, perhaps nothing farther was required.

But if the wild dream had ever crossed their rebellious imaginations, that the help, which was not to be found within, might possibly come from liberal and heretical Englandwell, here is a dream-dispelling admonition with a vengeance; here are Englishmen consigned to the same fate as any Neapolitan malcontent; and one of these stiffnecked Englishmen, though he be but a poor assistant engineer, driven to the verge of madness and the deplorable attempt to escape by suicide from the rigours of a Neapolitan commitment for trial. All this, mark you, within three days' steam of Malta, and with English menof-war steamers occasionally dropping in and out of the bay.

Thus far had we written, "speculating," as we said, "not without curious interest," upon the colouring which this matter would take in the eyes of Neapolitans, when one morning, as we ran our eye down the foreign correspondence of the Times, the following passage, in ample confirmation of our expectations, chanced to arrest it :

"Letters reached Turin yesterday, from Naples, mentioning the unfavourable impression produced in that capital by Lord Palmerston's declaration with respect to the engineers of the Cagliari. The writers assert, whether correctly or not may be matter of doubt, that the Premier has been misinformed, and that the treatment of the two prisoners in question is by no means so satisfactory as he represented in his place in Parliament. The truth is, I suspect, that the Neapolitans are far from pleased at the turn the question has taken. Unable to help themselves, or to struggle successfully against the oppression that crushes them, they live in hopes of seeing their rulers embroiled with a foreign power, and of thus obtaining an opportunity of revolt. They thought it probable that the stir made in England about the engineers would bring to the Bay of Naples Admiral Lyons and his squadron, and they say and this is true enough-that ships of war are the only representatives of Great Britain to which the government of King Ferdinand is likely to pay attention. They were naturally disappointed and vexed at finding that the English Cabinet did not consider the question one calling for such strong measures; and we must, therefore, not receive with implicit confidence the

statements they transmit respecting the treatment of the two English prisoners." There is something almost ludicrous in the studied moderation of this language-an ingenuousness in the statement of the birth of a suspicion in the writer's mind, that the Neapolitans are, forsooth, "far from pleased at the turn the question has taken," which would be touching, were it not manifestly ironical. The candour with which he is anxious to point out that they are not wholly unprejudiced witnesses is irresistibly comic, and so is the admonition 'not to receive with implicit confidence the statements they transmit." But, ironical or sin cere, we stand no longer in need of any caution upon this point. With shame and indignation we must now admit that no statement had reached us concerning the treatment of our unhappy fellow-countrymen, which the reality was not to justify. For we have now before us those means of testing the genuineness of the controverted statements, which were wanting to the Turin correspondent of the Times when he penned the lines we have quoted above. We allude, of course, to the document relative to the imprisonment of the engineers, Watt and Park, at Salerno, which has been published by order of Parliament, and made known to the whole world by the daily press. That document, as our readers must all know, consists of an extract from a letter written from Naples to Lord Clarendon by Acting-Consul Barbar, and of a statement drawn up by that gentleman from the report made verbally to himself by the prisoners, when, upon the 25th of last November, he was admitted to a conference with them. We will not inflict, therefore, upon their patience a recapitulation of its contents, but will only beg of them to consider whether they do not bear us out fully in the opinion which we have ventured to express above that if ever there were a case wherein the weakness of an antagonist need not have been permitted to shield him from the consequences of his misconduct, such a one is before us. It may, perhaps, be of little moment to the imperial policy of Britain, that it should present a deplorable, nay contemptible, aspect in the eyes of beings whose political consequence is so utterly insignificant as

that of the unhappy subjects of the Neapolitan crown. But, after all, these things are done in the face of Europe and the world, and we cannot conceive that any Briton can feel otherwise than angered and mortified when the press of these islands first copies and disseminates such an extract as this from the official journal of Naples :

"In answer to questions on the subject of the treatment which the English prisoners in Salerno had received, Lord Palmerston replied that it had been ottimo,' and thus concluded; I think that there is no reason of complaint against the Neapolitan Government. We have no right to require that our than others who were taken in the act countrymen should be better treated of violating the Neapolitan laws.""

And then prints almost side by side such a document as Mr. Barbar's recital of the mean, insolent, dishonest, filthy, and eruel manner, in which, amidst the execration of their own people, the Neapolitan authorities have dared to deal, for seven long months, with British citizens uncondemned, and, for all they are untried, manifestly and palpably innocent of offence!

Poor Neapolitans! and, if possible, Sicilians poorer still! this Cagliari case, after all, may prove an invaluable lesson to them, though it be not much more than a corollary to the conclusions which the events of nine years back have proved to demonstration before their eyes. Not that we complain; nor that we have ever heard a judicious Italian lover of Italian liberty complain of a simple refusal, on the part of England, to intervene in the great controversy between the Italian people and their native or foreign misrulers. Interference in her affairs has been, for centuries, too sorely the curse of the sad and beautiful land, for those who love her to have faith in its efficacy. But that of which Italians may fairly, as they do bitterly, complain that of which we too complain, for the honour of Britain, as well as for the love we bear Italyis the loudly, though lightly, spoken word of encouragement, which is not meant to be verified by a single enforcing action. We will not go back, for justification of this remark, to so far as nine years ago; we will not talk of a proffered recognition of the Duke