For whither will not the rays of Hope penetrate? Even when Hope is really gone, her work is often done by Despair; and the latter feeling, in its extreme, is thus often akin to Hope herself.
The hope, then, that cheered and animated the Earl at times, was—Escape!
Yes: he yearned to quit that dungeon, not so much for his own sake—oh! not nearly so much, as for that of his half-brother, who was involved in such peril, and who needed influence and interest to save him! For the Earl well knew that the law in criminal cases is not so tardy as in civil matters; and that to take away a man's life, all its machinery is set into rapid motion—although to settle his claims to a fortune or to give him justice against his neighbour, it is, heaven knows! heart-breakingly slow and wearisome!
To send a man to the scaffold, takes but a few weeks at the Old Bailey:—to decide the right of this man or that man to a particular estate, or legacy, occupies years and years in the Court of Chancery. Oh! how thirsty do our legislators appear to drink human blood. How rapidly all technicalities and causes of delay are cleared away when the capital offender stands before his judge! A day—perhaps an hour is sufficient to decide the death of a human being; but half a century may elapse ere the conflicting claims to an acre of land or a few thousand pounds can be settled elsewhere.
And, strange—ah! and monstrous, too, is it, that the man who loses a case in which he sues his neighbour for twenty pounds, may appeal to another tribunal—have a new trial granted—and, losing that also, perhaps obtain a third investigation of the point at issue, and thus three verdicts in that beggarly business! But the man who is doomed to die—who loses his case against the criminal prosecutor—cannot appeal to another tribunal. No judges sit solemnly in banco for him: one verdict is sufficient to take away a life. Away with him to the scaffold! In this great commercial country, twenty pounds—consisting of pieces of paper printed upon and stamped with particular figures—are of more consequence than a being of flesh and blood! What though this being of flesh and blood may have others—a wife and children—dependent on him? No matter! Give him not the chance of a new trial: let one judge and one jury suffice to consign him to the hangman! There can be no appeal—no re-investigation for his case, although it be a case of life and death: but away with him to the scaffold!
What blood-thirsty and atrocious monsters have our law-givers been: what cruel, inhuman beings are they still, to perpetuate so abominable—so flagrant—so infamous a state of jurisprudence! For how many have been hanged, though innocent,—their guiltlessness transpiring when it is too late! But there is no court of appeal for the man accused of a capital crime: he is a dog who has got a bad name—and public opinion dooms him to be hanged, days and weeks before the jury is sworn or the judge takes his seat to try him!
And wherefore is not this infamous state of the law, which allows appeals to the case of money-claims, but none to the case of capital accusations,—wherefore is not this state of the law altered? Because our legislators are too much occupied with their own party contentions and strifes;—because they are ever engaged in battling for the Ministerial benches—the "loaves and fishes" of power: because it seems to them of more consequence to decide whether Sir Robert Peel or Lord John Russell shall be Prime Minister—whether the Conservatives or the Whigs shall hold the reins of power. Or else, gentle reader, the condition of Greece—or Spain—or Turkey,—or even perhaps of Otaheite,—is a matter of far greater importance than the lives of a few miserable wretches in the condemned cells of criminal gaols!
But, in our estimation—and we have the misfortune to differ from the legislators of the country—the life of one of those wretches is of far greater consequence than the state of tyrant-ridden Greece—the Spanish marriages—the quarrels of the Sultan and his Pachas—or the miserable squabbles of hypocritical English missionaries and a French governor in Tahiti. Yes—in our estimation, the life of one man outweighs all such considerations; and we would rather see half a session of Parliament devoted to the discussion of the grand question of the Punishment of Death, than one single day of that session given to all the foreign affairs that ever agitated in a Minister's brain.
It was the twenty-eighth day of Lord Ellingham's imprisonment; and it was about six o'clock on the evening of this day.