With a warmth
honourable both to his head and his heart, Sir Alexander Ball
pleaded, as not less a point of sound policy than of plain justice,
that the Maltese, by some representative, should be made a party in
the capitulation, and a joint subscriber in the signature. They had
never been the slaves or the property of the Knights of St. John, but
freemen and the true landed proprietors of the country, the civil and
military government of which, under certain restrictions, had been
vested in that Order; yet checked by the rights and influences of the
clergy and the native nobility, and by the customs and ancient laws
of the island. This trust the Knights had, with the blackest treason
and the most profligate perjury, betrayed and abandoned. The right
of government of course reverted to the landed proprietors and the
clergy. Animated by a just sense of this right, the Maltese had
risen of their own accord, had contended for it in defiance of death
and danger, had fought bravely, and endured patiently.
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