39 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PIECES. THE LIKE AND THE DIFFERENT. A FEW months ago, the Right Honourable W. E. Gladstone, the member of the British Parliament for Oxford, published "Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government." Mr Gladstone appears to be one of the most conservative Commoners in England; and he writes, if I mistake not, to one of the most conservative of the Lords. The letters have filled England with amazement. The work was published last July, and it is now the twenty-fourth of October while I write; but ten editions have already been exhausted in England, and the eleventh has had time to travel three thousand miles, and find its way to my desk. Mr Gladstone makes some disclosures which have astonished the simplicity of Father England. He accuses the Government of Naples, in its treatment of those accused of political offences, of "an outrage upon religion, upon civilization, upon humanity, and upon decency." What is more, he abundantly substantiates his accusation by details so horrible, that he thinks they will not be credited by his countrymen; for the actual wickedness of the Neapolitan Government surpasses all that Englishmen had thought it possible for malice to invent or tyranny to inflict. Here are some of the matters of fact, of a general nature. "It is not mere imperfection, not ambition in low quarters, not occasional severity, that I am about to describe; it is an incessant, systematic, deliberate violation of the law by the power appointed to watch over and maintain it. It is such violation of human and written law as this, carried on for the purpose of violating every other law, unwritten and eternal, human or divine.' "It is the awful profanation of public religion, by its notorious alliance, in the governing powers, with the violation of every moral law, under the stimulant of fear and vengeance. "The effect of all this is total inversion of all the moral and social ideas. Law, instead of being respected, is odious. Force, and not affection, is the foundation of government. The governing power is clothed with all the vices for its attributes." He thinks there are not less than twenty thousand prisoners for political offences, locked up in jail; between four and five hundred were to be tried for their lives on the 15th of May. Of one hundred and forty Deputies who formed the Legislative Assembly in 1849, seventy-six had been arrested, or had fled into exile. The law of Naples requires that "personal liberty shall be inviolable, except under a warrant from a Court of Justice, authorized for the purpose." But in defiance of this law, "the Government watches and dogs the people; pays domiciliary visits very unceremoniously at night; ransacks houses; seizes papers; imprisons men by the score,-by the hundred, by the thousand,—without any warrant whatever, sometimes without any written authority at all, or anything beyond the word of a police man. After the illegal arrest, the trial is long delayed,-sometimes more than two years. "Every effort is made to concoct a charge, by the perversion and partial production of real evidence; and, this failing, the resort is to perjury and forgery. The miserable creatures, to be found in most communities, who are ready to sell the liberty and life of fellow-subjects for gain, and throw their own souls into the bargain, are deliberately employed by the Executive power to depose, according to their instructions, against the men whom it is thought desirable to ruin." |