ot decent, for it was not necessary, that capture should be followed
so rapidly by trial, and condemnation by execution. Neither time nor
circumstances pressed. The insurrection was over. Except the siege of
St. Elmo, hostilities near Naples were at an end. That Caracciolo's
judges were naval officers who had recently been in action with him
would be, with average military men, rather in the prisoner's favor
than otherwise; but it was very far from being in his favor that they
were men in whom the angry passions engendered by civil warfare, and
licentious spoliation, had not yet had time to cool. Neither the
judges nor the revising power allowed themselves space for reflection.
Nelson himself failed to sustain the dispassionate and magnanimous
attitude that befitted the admiral of a great squadron, so placed as
to have the happy chance to moderate the excesses which commonly
follow the triumph of parties in intestine strife. But, however he
then or afterwards may have justified his course to his own
conscience, his great offence was against his own people. To his
secondary and factitious position of delegate from the King of Naples,
he virtually sacrificed the consideration due to his inalienable
character of representative of the King and State of Great Britain. He
should have remembered that the act would appear to the world, not as
that of the Neapolitan plenipotentiary, but of the British officer,
and that his nation, while liable like others to bursts of unreasoning
savagery, in its normal moods delights to see justice clothed in
orderly forms, unstained by precipitation or suspicion of perversion,
advancing to its ends with the majesty of law, without unseemly haste,
providing things honest in the sight of all men. That he did not do
so, when he could have done so, has been intuitively felt; and to the
instinctive resentment thus aroused among his countrymen has been due
the facility with which the worst has been too easily believed.

Commander Jeaffreson Miles of the British Navy, writing in 1843, was
one of the first, if not the very first, to clear effectually Nelson's
reputation from the stigma of treachery, and of submission to unworthy
influences, at this time. He has sought also to vindicate his hasty
action in Caracciolo's case, by citing the swift execution of two
seamen by Lord St. Vincent, at a time when mutiny was threatening. It
cannot be denied that, for deterrent effect, punishment at times must
be