M. Pacifico having, from year to year, been treated either with answers wholly unsatisfactory, or with a positive refusal, or with pertinacious silence, it came at last to this, either that his demand was to be abandoned altogether, or that, in pursuance of the notice we had given the Greek Government a year or two before, we were to proceed to use our own means of enforcing the claim. “Oh! but,” it is said, “what an ungenerous proceeding to employ so large a force against so small a power!” Does the smallness of a country justify the magnitude of its evil acts? Is it held that if your subjects suffer violence, outrage, plunder, in a country which is small and weak, you are to tell them when they apply for redress, that the country is so weak and so small that we cannot ask it for compensation? Their answer would be, that the weakness and smallness of the country make it so much the more easy to obtain redress. “No,” it is said, “generosity is to be the rule.” We are to be generous to those who have been ungenerous to you; and we cannot give you redress because we have such ample and easy means of procuring it. Well, then, was there anything so uncourteous in sending, to back our demands, a force which should make it manifest to all the world that resistance was out of the question? Why, it seems to me, on the contrary, that it was more consistent with the honor and dignity of the Government on whom we made those demands, that there should be placed before their eyes a force, which it would be vain to resist, and before which it would be no indignity to yield. If we had sent merely a frigate and a sloop of war, or any force with which it was possible their forces might have matched, we should have placed them in a more undignified position by asking them to yield to so small a demonstration. Therefore, so far from thinking that the amount of the force which happened to be on the spot was any aggravation of what was called the indignity of our demand, it seems to me that the Greek Government, on the contrary, ought rather to have considered it as diminishing the humiliation, whatever it might be, of being obliged to give at last to compulsion, that which had been so long refused to entreaty.