Amiens, in which we neither recognised our former relations with
France nor with the other European powers, nor formed any new ones,
the compromise concerning Malta formed the prominent feature; and its
nominal re-delivery to the Order of St. John was authorised, in the
minds of the people, by Lord Nelson's opinion of its worthlessness to
Great Britain in a political or naval view. It is a melancholy fact,
and one that must often sadden a reflective and philanthropic mind,
how little moral considerations weigh even with the noblest nations,
how vain are the strongest appeals to justice, humanity, and national
honour, unless when the public mind is under the immediate influence
of the cheerful or vehement passions, indignation or avaricious hope.
In the whole class of human infirmities there is none that make such
loud appeals to prudence, and yet so frequently outrages its plainest
dictates, as the spirit of fear. The worst cause conducted in hope
is an overmatch for the noblest managed by despondency; in both
cases, an unnatural conjunction that recalls the old fable of Love
and Death, taking each the arrows of the other by mistake. When
islands that had courted British protection in reliance upon British
honour, are with their inhabitants and proprietors abandoned to the
resentment which we had tempted them to provoke, what wonder, if the
opinion becomes general, that alike to England as to France, the
fates and fortunes of other nations are but the counters, with which
the bloody game of war is played; and that notwithstanding the great
and acknowledged difference between the two Governments during
possession, yet the protection of France is more desirable because it
is more likely to endure? for what the French take, they keep. Often
both in Sicily and Malta have I heard the case of Minorca referred
to, where a considerable portion of the most respectable gentry and
merchants (no provision having been made for their protection on the
re-delivery of that island to Spain) expiated in dungeons the warmth