nly kindness,
which had led her to befriend the Royalists in their time of trouble,
would not suffer her to refuse a meal and a hiding place to the wretched
men who now entreated her to protect them. She took them into her house,
set meat and drink before them, and showed them where they might take
rest. The next morning her dwelling was surrounded by soldiers. Strict
search was made. Hickes was found concealed in the malthouse, and
Nelthorpe in the chimney. If Lady Alice knew her guests to have been
concerned in the insurrection, she was undoubtedly guilty of what in
strictness was a capital crime. For the law of principal and accessory,
as respects high treason, then was, and is to this day, in a state
disgraceful to English jurisprudence. In cases of felony, a distinction
founded on justice and reason, is made between the principal and the
accessory after the fact. He who conceals from justice one whom he knows
to be a murderer is liable to punishment, but not to the punishment of
murder. He, on the other hand, who shelters one whom he knows to be a
traitor is, according to all our jurists, guilty of high treason. It
is unnecessary to point out the absurdity and cruelty of a law which
includes under the same definition, and visits with the same penalty,
offences lying at the opposite extremes of the scale of guilt. The
feeling which makes the most loyal subject shrink from the thought of
giving up to a shameful death the rebel who, vanquished, hunted down,
and in mortal agony, begs for a morsel of bread and a cup of water, may
be a weakness; but it is surely a weakness very nearly allied to
virtue, a weakness which, constituted as human beings are, we can hardly
eradicate from the mind without eradicating many noble and benevolent
sentiments. A wise and good ruler may not think it right to sanction
this weakness; but he will generally connive at it, or punish it very
tenderly. In no case will he treat it as a crime of the blackest dye.
Whether Flora Macdonald was justified in concealing the attainted heir
of the Stuarts, whether a brave soldier of our own time was justified in
assisting the escape of Lavalette, are questions on which casuists
may differ: but to class such actions with the crimes of Guy Faux and
Fieschi is an outrage to humanity and common sense. Such, however, is
the classification of our law. It is evident that nothing but a lenient
administration could make such a state of the law endurable. And it i