Note D — THE FALKLAND ISLANDS.

This, however, is more apparent than real. Though the Earl of Derby, speaking on the Address to the Throne, the opening night of the present session, pleasantly twitted Ministers with their omission in the Royal Speech of all allusion to Sir C. Hotham’s Paraguayan mission, and with consequent indifference to its objects, it must not be inferred that the Aberdeen Cabinet is in the least degree insensible to the importance of securing such benefits to our commerce as the Malmesbury Treaty seeks to accomplish, though there may be some discrepancy of opinion as to the extent that treaty succeeded in such direction. Seven years ago, Lord Aberdeen, then foreign secretary in the Peel Administration, in his instructions to Sir William G. Ouseley, then minister at Buenos Ayres, for his guidance in the joint intervention by England and France between Buenos Ayres and Monte Video, said:—‘The war in which the Argentine arms are at present engaged, is waged against a state, the independence of which England is virtually bound to uphold.’ Lord Aberdeen instructed his minister, ‘to open up the great arteries of the South-American continent to the free circulation of commerce, would be not only a vast benefit to the trade of Europe, but a practical, and perhaps the best, security for the preservation of peace in South America.’