I will venture to assert very confidently that, besides those which have been produced, there are half a dozen times as many which the Foreign Office has not produced; so that if we find anything in these papers showing 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
