628 The Wellington and the Grey Administrations. DEC. 



is not on the Continent, from the straights of Dover to the Euxine, a 

 single kingdom, where the subject is secure of his liberty for the next 

 twenty-four hours or minutes. An order of the king, or of the king's 

 minister, or of any of the hundred underlings of office, may seize, with- 

 out any ostensible cause, without any crimination, but on the mere 

 declaration of the king's will, any individual in the kingdom. A man 

 of the most innocent and retired habits may be torn at a moment's 

 notice from his fireside, his business destroyed, his family scattered and 

 pauperized, his good name ruined, and his life sacrificed in some dun- 

 geon by damp, chains, and sorrow. 



If he survive the first miseries of his dungeon, there he may lie for 

 years, till the spiders and snails grow familiar with him, till he wears the 

 semblance more of a wild beast than a man, and till his mind is in- 

 flamed into frenzy, or sunk into fatuity. He may be perfectly guiltless 

 of public crime, he may be perfectly at a loss even to conceive for what 

 offence he has been undone ; yet there he must lie. He cannot, like the 

 Englishman, demand a trial, where he may confound his accusers. He 

 cannot insist on being either confronted with justice, or set at liberty. 

 The cruelties of thePopish Inquisition, originally borrowed from secular 

 cruelties, and refining on them, have been borrowed back for the use of 

 the royal dungeons; and how shall we as Englishmen, or as human beings, 

 wonder that men exposed to those miseries should demand some consti- 

 tutional security against them ? 



It is true, that in the general classes of life those cruelties may be 

 seldom felt. So long as the subject is content to stay in the mediocrity 

 in which chance placed him at first, so long as he remains the peasant, 

 turning up the ground from day to day, and at last laying himself down 

 in it, without a thought beyond the horse he drives, or the sheep he 

 shears ; so long he will be in all probability passed over by power. But 

 if that peasant shall desire to make the natural use of his faculties, and 

 be something above the clod ; or if he feel indignant at some act of 

 oppression, that would be enough to rouse the stones to mutiny ; or if 

 he refuse to submit to the insolence or the rapine of a superior, his 

 immunity is gone, from that instant. The dungeon opens for him, and 

 his only escape from that dungeon is into the grave. 



It is true, that the dissipated nobleman, the courtier, the whole race 

 who live on the public property, and who are essential to the show of 

 Courts, may pass their lives in security enough. But let one of those 

 dare to be something more honourable ; let him think his rank, wealth, 

 and leisure worse employed in dangling about a levee, or dancing a 

 quadrille, or robbing some dupe at a gaming-table, than in promoting 

 any object of public good, and he is from that moment a marked man ; 

 his name is set down in the jailor's list, and at length he vanishes to some 

 fortress, where he may meditate on the hazards of being wiser and better 

 than the fools and profligates of his generation. How many hundred or 

 thousand Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians are at this hour 

 groaning in the dungeons of their kings ! Not one of them is brought 

 to trial, nor intended to be brought to trial. There they must lie till 

 death, a revolution, or the day of judgment ! 



We will not say, because we yet have not the ex-premier's own decla- 

 ration on the subject, that he was a sharer in that fearful modification 

 of the Holy Alliance, which is called the Metternich league ; and whose 

 object is notoriously to combine all monarchs against all constitutional 



