His charge against the Neapolitan Government was not one of mere
imperfection, not corruption in low quarters, not occasional severity,
but that of incessant, systematic, deliberate violation of the law by
the power appointed to watch over and maintain it.
Mr. Gladstone, with impassionate language, thus formulates his fearful
indictment: "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 and divine; it is the wholesale persecution of virtue,
when united with intelligence, operating upon such a scale that entire
classes may with truth be said to be its object, so that the Government
is in bitter and cruel, as well as utterly illegal hostility to whatever
in the nation really lives and moves, and forms the mainspring of
practical progress and improvement; it is the awful profanation of
public religion, by its notorious alliance in the governing powers with
the violation of every moral rule under the stimulants of fear and
vengeance; it is the perfect prostitution of the judicial office which
has made it, under veils only too threadbare and transparent, the
degraded recipient of the vilest and clumsiest forgeries, got up
wilfully and deliberately, by the immediate advisers of the Crown, for
the purpose of destroying the peace, the freedom, aye, and even, if not
by capital sentences, the life of men among the most virtuous, upright,
intelligent, distinguished and refined of the whole community; it is the
savage and cowardly system of moral as well as in a lower degree of
physical torture, through which the sentences obtained from the debased
courts of justice are carried into effect.
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