they said, as the trade was legal, there were regulations prescribing the number of slaves to be carried on board of a vessel of particular dimensions; but now, when the trade and the regulations for conducting it were equally abolished, three or four hundred slaves were crowded into a space in which formerly not one-fourth part of the number would have been immured. The committee appointed to report upon this petition, found themselves compelled to admit the facts: they declared that they found it impossible to doubt of the existence of the trade, in spite of the laws, and of the measures taken by government to insure their execution. They agreed with the petitioners, "that it was necessary to seek the means of rendering the existing laws more efficacious, and removing the obstacles which stood in the way of a complete suppression of a traffic, the impurity of which was a blot on the French name;" and they therefore proposed, that the petition should be referred to the president of the council of ministers. General Sebastiani and Benjamin Constant argued, that the whole blame lay with the ministers; for either they did not faithfully execute a sufficiently efficacious law, or they betrayed their duty in not proposing measures which would be so; and they declaimed loudly on the inhuman practice of slave-ships, when chased, throwing the negroes over-board, to conceal the nature of the cargo which they had carried. To this, M. de Villèle answered very sensibly, that no new law was required to punish such atrocities. "Throwing negroes into the sea, is murder, and punishable accord ingly. Insisting on such things is merely empty declamation." On

the other parts of the question, he said that government, had gone to the full length of their powers. Even slave-ships and their com➡ manders that had withdrawn into foreign countries, had been pro ceeded against; and, at that moment, the question of the legality of such prosecutions, which had been ordered by government, was pending before the court of appeal. To increase the severity of the law might be injurious to the very persons whom it was wished to protect; for if, as the petitioners alleged, the traffic was now carried on with precautions against deteetion which exposed its miserable victims to greater sufferings than before, would not the effect of making the punishment capital be, that those who followed the trade, would, to escape from the gibbet, adopt precautions still more inhuman than those they now prac tised to escape from confiscation? "The real cause of the evil" said he, "lies in the difficulty of apply ing the law. Therefore it is, that the ministry redoubles its efforts and its precautions, and it is thus that it will arrive at the end which it proposes, much better than by a more severe penalty. We must arrive insensibly at the point; and we have already made a great advance, since there is no hesitation to apply the law. Do not doubt but that we shall immediately have fewer complaints. While this is our conviction, it would be on our part an act of weakness to give way to declamation, and to adopt measures, which, instead of reaching the object, would carry us away from it." A M. Dudon actually spoke feelingly of the misery of the captains of slave ships: "torn from their country, and their families, and reduced to

In the Chamber of Peers, the duke de Choiseul declared, with the usual mixture of bad taste and egregious vanity so ordinary in French rhetoricians, "that anathemas were pronounced against the enemies and oppressors of Greece, against all who furnished arms, or afforded military instruction, to unbelievers in the cross; that Europe, led by the example of France, was pouring forth gifts and offerings for their brethren in the East, and opening a new Crusade of benefits and generosity that, next to the honour of being a French peer, was the honour of being a member of the Greek committee; that however the barbarous policy of cabinets might crush the glorious cause, his name, and those of other Greek committee-men would be consecrated by posterity for their attachment to liberty, religion, and humanity; and that the greatest fault of the budget that it did not contain a vote in favour of Greece." The more sober, rational, and practical views of the ministers, as opposed to these crude ebullitions of superficiality and sentimentalism, were to be learned from the report of a committee, to whom a petition connected with the Greek cause had been referred. The report of the Committee was the following:

"The interest with which the Chamber has heard in a recent de

bate the eloquent expression of the sentiments which the misfortunes of Greece inspire, proves that it is unanimous upon this point. They are, in fact, unfortunate men, Christians, who combat with courage, not to defend a political opinion, but to save their property, their lives, their religion. On seeing them fall by thousands under the sword of the Turks, who could refuse his pity to so much suffering-his admiration to so much courage? But the cause of Greece has served as a pretence for some men to attack the government, and the Chamber has thought, with reason, that it would not become the government to meddle with these attacks. It has thought that the silence of all other nations would be sufficient to justify the conduct of government. How, in fact, could France take upon herself to light the torch of discord, and throw, perhaps, all Europe into a general war?

"These considerations have determined us to propose to you, not to receive a proposition, which is not the mere expression of a sentiment of pity, but which would be, if taken into consideration, the approval of a political system which presents the greatest danger."

Specific charges of direct interference on the part of the French government to give assistance to Turkey, and thus violate the neutrality which she professed, were capable of more direct and specific answers. It was alleged that the ministers had supplied officers to Ibrahim; that, under their eyes, his vessels had been built at

Marseilles, and the cannon made that were used in the siege of Missolonghi; that they allowed agents to recruit for him openly

in France, and permitted the officers whom he enlisted to retain their military rank; and that, after the expedition of Ibrahim into the Morea, his treasures had been transported from Alexandria to Navarino, in a French ship of war. In so far, however, as any of these accusations were founded in fact, it did not appear that they could fairly be imputed as matters of blame to the French ministry, although it might well be, that the ministers took no warm interest, and could have no direct interest, in the success of the Greeks. It was true that the treasures of the Egyptian army had been transported to Greece in French vessels; but every officer concerned in that act had been recalled, as well as the commander on the station, and had been punished. Vessels had been built at Marseilles for other potentates equally unchristian as the pacha of Egypt, without objection; they had been built for the dey of Algiers, although his object and interest were, to employ them against every Christian power in Europe. The pacha had been allowed to build a frigate and a corvette; but he had been allowed only to build them, not to arm them. If there were agents in France recruiting for him, it was difficult to see how government could restrain them, when their proceedings were justified by the conduct of their very opponents; for surely it would be no observance of the national neutrality, if the government prohibited the agents of Turkey from begging or bribing for their master, while the Greek-committee men, and their agents, were not only collecting men, arms, and money, in every part of the kingdom for the service of Greece, but boasted publicly in

the legislature of the success which attended their exertions. Sevè, a renegade, over whom France had no longer any power, was the only officer in the Turkish army who had borne a French commission; but several of them were to be found in the ranks of the Greek forces. Government, if it wished to preserve an impartial neutrality, could only grant to both parties, the liberty of doing such things or grant it to neither. The ad. herents of the Greek cause accused the French squadron in the Levant of various acts of hostility towards the Greek maritime forces; but the reports of admiral de Rigny, who commanded on that station, refuted the charge. According to these reports, of the transports forming part of Ibrahim's fleet, which reached the Morea in November, 1825, some were Austrian, some English, some were Spanish, Tuscan, Sardinian, or American, but not one was French: on the request of the admiral, Ibrahim had delivered up to him all the female slaves within his reach, purchased from his own soldiers, and they were sent to Napoli di Romania. An account of the French having fired upon a vessel of the Greek admiral Canaris was contradicted by a declaration under the hand of Canaris himself: from the commencement of the troubles, the French fleet had served as an asylum to upwards of seven thousand Greeks, men, women, and children; it had never carried either troops or money to the Turks in the Morea, and had never fired on a Greek vessel, except on pirates for the defence of French merchantmen. The cannon used in the siege of Missolonghi were not French cannon; the officers who directed the siege were not