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."

If the defendant has counter-evidence, he is not allowed. to produce it in court.

Here are matters of fact of a more particular nature. The filth of the prisons is beastly. The doctors never visit the prisoners. Three or four hundred prisoners "all slept in a long, low, vaulted room, having no light except from a single and very moderate-sized grating at one end.

From December 7th, 1850, to February 3rd, 1851, Signor Pironte, a gentleman who had been a judge, was shut up in a cell "about eight feet square, below the level of the ground, with no light except a grating at the top of the wall, out of which he could not see.' This was in the city of Naples.

Signor Carlo Poerio, formerly a minister of the Court, was illegally arrested, thrown into jail, and kept for seven or eight months in total ignorance of the offence charged against him. At length he was accused of belonging to a party which did not exist. He was tried by a special court. The only evidence against him was that of a hired and worthless informer of the Government; even that was inconsistent, contradictory, and of no value. Of course, Signor Poerio was found guilty. He was sentenced to twenty-four years imprisonment in irons. He and sixteen others were confined in the Bagno of Nisida, in a cell about thirteen feet by ten, and ten feet high. When the beds were let down for these seventeen men, there was no space between them. The prisoners were chained in pairs, with irons that weigh about thirty-three pounds to each man. The chains are never taken off. The food is bread, and a soup so nauseous that only famine can force it down the throat.

To justify itself, the Government has published a "Philosophical Catechism for the use of Schools," which teaches the theory which the authorities practise. It declares that the prince is not bound to keep the constitution when it "impugns the right of sovereignty" of himself. "Whenever the people may have proposed a condition which impairs the sovereignty [the arbitrary power of the king], and when the prince may have promised to observe it, that proposal is an absurdity, that promise is null." "It is the business of the sovereign" "to decide when the promise is null." This Catechism, which seeks to justify

the perjury of a monarch, and announces the theory of crime, is published by authority, and in the name of "the Most Holy and Almighty God, the Trinity in Unity.”

The disclosures in Mr Gladstone's letters filled England with horror. Even Naples fears the public opinion of Europe, and the Neapolitan Government became alarmed. Some attempts have been made by its officials, it is said, to deny the facts. The British thought them too bad to be true.

Yet the Government of Naples is not wholly inaccessible to mercy. For Mr Morris, the American minister at Naples, becoming interested in a young man, Signor Domenico Nostromarina, confined in the island of Capri for some alleged political offence, asked his pardon of the king, and it was granted.

The American Declaration of Independence announces it as self-evident, that all men are created equal, and with certain unalienable rights, and amongst them the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and the design of Government is to secure those rights.

The Constitution of Massachusetts provides that "Every person has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person," and "all warrants therefore are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation." But, in September, 1851, more than fifty persons were seized by the creatures of the city government of Boston, with no warrant, not for the purpose of a trial, and were publicly exhibited, by the marshal of the city, to the mob who came to stare at them.

In April, 1851, an officer in the pay of the city of Boston, with no warrant, seized Thomas Simms, then an inhabitant of that city, on a false pretence, by night, and brought him before a subaltern officer of the General Government of the United States. He was confined in a court-house belonging to one of the counties of Massachusetts, which was, for the time, converted into a jail for his detention, contrary to the law of the State. Officers acting under the laws of Massachusetts, and subject to its penalties, aided in kidnapping and detaining this unfortunate man, though the law of Massachusetts forbid such conduct on their part.