which Prince
Schwarzenberg had taunted Lord Aberdeen by way of rejoinder to Mr.
Gladstone's letters on barbarous misgovernment in Naples, and the
feelings that they had roused were still smouldering. Half a dozen
newspapers existed, all of them vehemently and irreconcilably unionist,
though all controlled by members of the legislative assembly who had
taken an oath at the beginning of each parliament to respect and
maintain the constitutional rights of the protecting sovereign. The
liberty of unlicensed printing, however, had been subject to a pretty
stringent check. By virtue of what was styled a power of high police,
the lord high commissioner was able at his own will and pleasure to tear
away from home, occupation, and livelihood anybody that he chose, and
the high police found its commonest objects in the editors of
newspapers. An obnoxious leading article was not infrequently followed
by deportation to some small and barren rock, inhabited by a handful of
fishermen. Not Cherubim and Seraphim, said Mr. Gladstone, could work
such a system. A British corporal with all the patronage in his hands,
said another observer, would get on better than the greatest and wisest
statesman since Pericles, if he had not the patronage. It was little
wonder that a distracted lord high commissioner, to adopt the similes of
the florid secretary of state, should one day send home a picture like
Salvator's Massacre of the Innocents, or Michel Angelo's Last Judgment,
and the next day recall the swains of Albano at repose in the landscapes
of Claude; should one day advise his chiefs to wash their hands of the
Ionians, and on the morrow should hint that perhaps the best thing
would be by a bold _coup d'etat_ to sweep away the constitution.[377]

III

THE STOLEN DESPATCH

Immediately after Mr. Gladstone had started, what the secretary of state
described as the most serious misfortune conceivable happened. A
despatch was stolen from the pigeon-holes of the colonial office, and a
morning paper printed it. It had been written home some eighteen months
before by Sir John Young, and in it he advised his government, with the
assent of the contracting powers, to hand over either the whole of the
seven islands to Greece, or else at least the five southern islands,
while transforming Corfu and its little satellite of Paxo into a British
colony. It was true that a few days later he had wri