n, some mighty Master of the World, renowned for valour, and for
prudence, one of those emphatically called the "Good" Emperors, kindly
presenting hundreds of men to kill each other for the amusement of the
Roman multitude--when you are told that that multitude contained, what
may have been for that age, good men, and gentle women--when, passing
lower down the turbid stream of the recorded past, you read of Popes and
Cardinals, Inquisitors and Bishops, men who must have heard from time to
time some portions of the holy words of mercy and of love, when you find
them, I say, counselling and plotting and executing, the foulest deeds of
blood--when, descending lower still, you approach those days when law
became the tyrant's favourite scourge, and you find the legal slave
telling his master how he has interrogated some poor wretch "in torture,
before torture, after torture, and between torture"--when you have some
insight into what that thing torture was, by contrasting the hand-writing
of the distracted sufferer before and after his examination--when, to
your surprise, you read that these very victims of persecution, were
themselves restless and dissatisfied, unless they could direct the arm of
power against another persecuted race--and when, coming to your own day,
you find that men, separated from you by distance, though not by time,
can show the utmost recklessness of human life, if differently coloured
from their own. Pondering over these things, your heart may well seek
comfort in the thought that these tyrants were, or are, rude men, of iron
frame, ready to inflict, ready themselves to suffer. It is not so. A
Nero clings to his own life with abject solicitude. A Louis the
Eleventh, who could keep other men in cages, wearies Heaven with prayers,
and Earth with strange devices, to preserve his own grotesque existence.
A James the First, who can sanction at the least, if not direct, the
torture to be applied to a poor, old, clergyman, was yet in the main a
soft-hearted man, can feel most tenderly for a broken limb of any
favourite, have an anxious affection for "Steenie and Baby Charles," and
an undoubted, and provident, regard for his own "sacred" person. What
shall we say, too, of that Chancellor of his, a man, like his master, of
a soft heart, full of the widest humanity, and yet, as far as we know,
unconscious of the horror of those ill doings transacted in his own great
presence? Why is it that I recall these th