e endeavour to
justify the asserted destruction of the swine by the analogy of
breaking open a cask of smuggled spirits, and wasting their contents
on the ground, is curiously unfortunate. Does Mr. Gladstone mean to
suggest that a Frenchman landing at Dover, and coming upon a cask of
smuggled brandy in the course of a stroll along the cliffs, has the
right to break it open and waste its contents on the ground? Yet the
party of Galileans who, according to the narrative, landed and took a
walk on the Gadarene territory, were as much foreigners in the
Decapolis as Frenchmen would be at Dover. Herod Antipas, their
sovereign, had no jurisdiction in the Decapolis--they were strangers
and aliens, with no more right to interfere with a pig-keeping Hebrew,
than I have a right to interfere with an English professor of the
Israelitic faith, if I see a slice of ham on his plate. According to
the law of the country in which these Galilean foreigners found
themselves, men might keep pigs if they pleased. If the men who kept
them were Jews, it might be permissible for the strangers to inform
the religious authority acknowledged by the Jews of Gadara; but to
interfere themselves, in such a matter, was a step devoid of either
moral or legal justification.

Suppose a modern English Sabbatarian fanatic, who believes, on the
strength of his interpretation of the fourth commandment, that it is a
deadly sin to work on the "Lord's Day," sees a fellow Puritan yielding
to the temptation of getting in his harvest on a fine Sunday
morning--is the former justified in setting fire to the latter's corn?
Would not an English court of justice speedily teach him better?

In truth, the government which permits private persons, on any pretext
(especially pious and patriotic pretexts), to take the law into their
own hands, fails in the performance of the primary duties of all
governments; while those who set the example of such acts, or who
approve them, or who fail to disapprove them, are doing their best to
dissolve civil society; they are compassers of illegality and fautors
of immorality.

I fully understand that Mr. Gladstone may not see the matter in this
light. He may possibly consider that the union of Gadara with the
Decapolis, by Augustus, was a "blackguard" transaction, which deprived
Hellenic Gadarene law of all moral force; and that it was quite proper
for a Jewish Galilean, going back to the time when the land of the
Girgashites was give