Lord Broughambegged to state that what he had advanced on a former occasion by way of conjecture, had now turned out to be true—viz., that the noble Lord the late, and the noble Lord the present, Secretary for the Colonies, had relied too much upon the statements of a Mr. Mitrovich, a petitioner to that House, who was described as an agent of the people of Malta, and who represented in his petition, that the Maltese were quite satisfied with the present state of the press, and begged that the ordinances might not be revoked. He (Lord Brougham) had said at the time, that he suspected Mitrovich had no authority for these statements, that he was not an accredited agent of the people of Malta, and that he had no more authority from them than he had, nor so much. He now held in his hand two newspapers from Malta, in which they abandoned and disclaimed Mitrovich, and said that they had nothing to do with him. The papers, moreover, were full of the debate in their Lordships' House, and one of them contained a very long argument against the ordinances, and supporting his arguments. He had never known anything of the kind more atrocious, than that this gentleman should pass as the agent of 1306 the people of Malta without a shadow of authority from them.
The Marquess of Normanbyhad never mentioned Mitrovich as agent for Malta; he had said, that he had received a letter from Mitrovich, but he had never spoken of him as an agent. As to the reception of the ordinances in Malta, he had that day received despatches from the Governor, and he gave a very different account of the matter from that which appeared in the newspapers referred to by the noble and learned Lord.
§ Subject dropped.