Arbitrary and illegal power being thus introduced were concealed from the eyes of the nation by the novel phrase, “Ministerial Responsibility;" a thing which could not exist. For from the moment that there were no longer "great officers of the Crown" responsible each one for his acts in his own department, no one could be prosecuted, and every prosecution, separate or collective, became impossible from the time when the evidence of the acts themselves was effaced, and when it further became impossible for the House of Commons, called "The Great Inquisition," to exhibit articles of impeachment before the House of Peers, called "The Great Tribunal." From that time everything passed in secret. No one knew or could know either who had advised a measure or who had executed it.

The House of Commons could not obtain either signatures or orders; neither had they any authority for consulting records. Records no longer existed.*

If, on the one hand, Ministerial Responsibility lent a false security to the new system, the irresponsibility, on the other hand, which resulted therefrom, did not make itself felt.

It had no action in the interior of the country; and the reaction (in wars, taxes, and debts) was not at all connected, according to the new ideas, with the recent usurpation, or with any cause whatever, but simply with events, and with what now began to be called "policy? If people suffered from it, no one blamed either the government or himself, but only the crimes and violences of foreign governments.

These ministers were at home not held in great awe. They walked the streets like others without guards and without parade. Had they struck a cobbler they would have been taken into custody like anybody else by the police. As ministers they could not appoint a beadle or administer an oath to a witness. If they wished to prosecute the humblest of criminals they were powerless to do so in their official character, and they had to go before the Courts like the meanest of their fellow-countrymen.

A remarkable case just now presents itself. We are at the hundred and twenty-third day of a trial instituted by Government before three judges and a jury. It is the trial of an individual who is accused of forgery and perjury. No evidence is admitted without a verification of the documents if it be in writing, or without crossexamination, if it be oral; everything being delivered on oath. The verdict of the jury has to be given unanimously, and the death of a single juryman would render the proceedings null and void. All commentary by newspapers is prohibited under pain of fine and im

*What has happened since I wrote these four words ought to open the eyes of the most blind. I speak of the diplomatic communications between Prussia and Italy in 1866, and of the lie given by Prince Bismarck to General La Marmora. We there see affairs the most important treated in private conversations, and consigned to documents which remain in the hands of a private individual, and for which one may seek in vain at the Foreign Office. What is more natural than that the result of these private conversations, and that what was treated in them, should have been infamy and crime? Such is the perfectionated result of permanent embassies; a practice which, in the absence of all judicial control, has changed the relations between nations into the conspiracies of some individuals directed now against one nation and now against another.

What a Legal Procedure is.

15

prisonment; they have to confine themselves to a simple report of what passes.

*

The judges instruct the jury as to the application of the law; and they direct the inquiry according to the rules of evidence. Afterwards the jury will return its verdict; the judges will pronounce sentence according to the law which is applicable to the case.

We see here what a legal procedure is; very different, it is true, from what takes place in France in a like case. We have the cooperation of four distinct powers: the legislative power from which proceed "the statutes" (regulations called laws made by Parliament); the judicial power in the persons of the judges; the independence of good sense represented by the jury; and, finally, the governmental action which brings the accused before the court. This method of procedure is what our forefathers discovered for the purpose of repressing crime and protecting innocence.

All this apparatus, all this labour, and all this care is taken in order that there should be no error with respect to the deeds of one single private individual, who acted solely by his own means and at his own risk, not to those of a high functionary who disposes of the resources of a whole nation.

We possess this admirable invention, and we apply it every day in thousands of cases. We derive benefit from it; we do not wish to change it, though we change everything; we take a pride in it; and yet the idea never occurs of applying it to the only class of men who use the resources of every one for the purpose of committing crimes, and who at will compromise the entire nation; for it becomes by their acts at once a criminal and a victim.

From the accession of WILLIAM III. down to the present time, not a single hour of the sort of examination which has been applied during three months to the Tichborne case, has been devoted to the whole of the affairs treated by the English Ministers.

At this moment an expedition directed against an African King is leaving the shores of England, and the newspapers are discussing a project of destroying his capital by fire. Here then is a case in which, instead of a single individual and the property of a single family, as in the Tichborne trial, the question is one affecting a whole people. Not only have the Ashantees to suffer, but the English troops who are sent to a country where the climate is deadly, and the English nation which has to defray the cost of the expedition. There is here no investigation-no inquiry! Orders have been given in several public offices of London to despatch troops, to furnish provisions, and to freight ships; and this is all.

If hostilities could only have been commenced after a judicial inquiry-as was formerly the case at Rome-the King of the Ashantees would have been put on his trial like any private individual accused of a crime meriting the punishment of death.

The trial here referred to has afforded a new application of this regulation. The newspapers-the Times especially-accompanied their reports with an analysis of the evidence in which they sometimes placed the evidence of the day in juxta-position with the contradictory evidence given on a former occasion. This was formally prohibited by the Court; for, as the Chief Justice observed, it was assuming the province of the jury.

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Difference between a judicial and a political Affair.

In the country where I now reside, an accident having lately occurred on a railway, an inquiry was the result; and the negligence of a superior employé having been proved, as also that of an inferior servant, the former was condemned to pay a fine of fifty francs, and the latter to two months' imprisonment. Negligence is in itself not a crime subject to punishment by human law, but it becomes so when injury ensues.

The English Minister at the Hague has not been imprisoned for two months; the Minister for Foreign Affairs in London has not been mulcted in a fine of fifty francs. The war against the Ashantees, nevertheless, resulted from the neglect of the former to execute the orders which he had received, and from the culpability of the latter in submitting to the disobedience of his subordinate.

The Swiss railway accident was a judicial affair; the War on the Gold Coast was a political affair.

The proposition which is now being submitted to the Assembly at Versailles, having for its object the establishment of a tribunal which shall alone be competent to decide questions of peace and war, would have a double effect. It would prevent insubordination in the servants of a State, and would lift public affairs out of the mire in which they are now plunged. It would also prevent an entire nation from becoming, without its will, or even its knowledge, guilty of murder and false witness; for we always slander those to whom we do violence.

The remedy for this is very simple; too simple, indeed, for the men of the present generation, unless there should spring up among them a great mind capable of directing their attention to it, and of compelling them to accept it.

When your government proposes to declare war against a people, it accuses that people of a capital crime; for war is a sentence of death. All that you have to do is to place the nation so accused in the dock as a criminal. Your government is, at present, accuser, judge, and executioner at the same time.

Can we be astonished that a system which so offends against reason and natural justice creates the social situation which we observe around us? The only logical means of warding off revolution is the Law; if you are unwilling to return to the one you must absolutely and necessarily fall into the other. In my own country there have long existed factions, and in the midst of the noise produced by their contention the complaints of the class who have been the chief sufferers have remained without effect. In this way is it also that discontent changes rapidly to revolt.

If I have succeeded in rescuing a portion of my fellow-countrymen from revolution, I have only been enabled to do so by presenting to them the law as a remedy; for if the Parliamentary Law passed in the reign of WILLIAM III., for controlling the arbitrary action of the Cabinet has been repealed, the Common Law still exists, though virtue and knowledge are wanting in the nation to take advantage of it as a means of protection.

"The result of this measure" (the repeal of the clause in the Act

Act of Anne has not changed the Common Law.

17

of Settlement), "is to leave the matter precisely where it was according to the Common Law before the Act of Settlement. It has in "no respect changed the Common Law," says Mr. ANSTEY in his Treatise on the Constitution of England. The idea of finding safety in a restoration of the Law destroyed at once all political speculation and gave a new birth to the upright man and citizen, whom the parliamentary régime has destroyed.

In the Appendix to this letter will be found some extracts which show the sort of instruction that has been received by the men of whom I speak, with respect to the remedies which the English Constitution offers ;† and to prove that they have acted and are still acting in this sense, I subjoin the text of a passage taken from a recent French publication.‡

France has systematically copied the errors of England, and afterwards exceeded them. Cannot she be enlightened by the rectification which is here attempted? Can she not be struck at the present critical time by the exposition given in this letter of the internal and administrative cause of the wars which England has made, but in which she (France) has been the principal sufferer, and of the existence in England herself of a school of men who for thirty years, after profound study, have discovered in the past the remedy for the evils of the present, and a protection against the horrors of the future?

Their maxims, however, differ in nothing essentially from what the Pope has announced in the remarkable words above cited on the perverse employment of power and armies; and from those which M. LUCIEN BRUN has recently addressed to the youth of France on the unhappiness of a country governed by men who do not respect the Law. Our associations of working men propose to their fellowcountrymen the means of preventing this evil employment of power and armies, and this government of nations by men who violate the Law.

NECESSITY OF A TRIBUNAL FOR WAR.

The dissimilarity between the Greeks and the Romans shows itself in nothing so clearly as this; namely, that the latter, fearing their own passions, imposed on themselves a bridle the most remarkable in the institutions of the human race by separating judicial powers in matters relating to foreign nations from royal, senatorial, and popular functions; a thing which they did not do as regards the exercise of hese powers amongst citizens.

The Greeks had the idea of a supreme court, but its attributions were restricted in the nature of a familien gerichte. They knew nothing of the Jus Gentium.

The Greeks, however, and especially the Athenians, falling into the state in which modern Europe now is.

were far from They had no

18

Pretended Hostility to Russia.

Cabinet; in other words, their decisions, if not judicial, were at least

not secret.

THEMISTOCLES, who, was first minister, as we should say, once attempted to act without the previous assent of the people, pretending the necessity of secresy, in order to derive advantage from the operation. It was not a question of undertaking a war, but of a military operation. The Athenians, up to a certain point, admitted the justice of his request, and declared themselves ready to allow him to act secretly; but on the sole condition that his plan, on being submitted to the judgment of one competent and honest man, should be approved of by the latter. Observe:-a Observe: a single man. The man chosen was ARISTIDES. We know the result.

Modern Europeans go to school. They study there especially the languages and history of the Greeks and Romans. They know then what I have just related. But on arriving at manhood they appear to lay on one side all they have learned as children, and to treat it as puerile.

Without having thought of the incident just narrated, but enlightened by the knowledge of events of our day in their secret motives, I have arrived at the conclusion that none of the modern wars could ever have been made if modern nations had fallen on the expedient invented by the Athenians, and required for the sanction of hostilities the verdict of a single man; that is to say, of an intelligent and upright man taken from outside the petty circle called the Cabinet.

This conviction I have not only expressed in a general manner, but I have applied it to divers cases; and there are some so clear and so striking, that the dates alone would have sufficed to render it impossible for any man whatever to give a verdict in their favour. Such, for example, as the war of England against DOST MOHAMMED, announced under pretext of his connexion with Russia, and undertaken after the exchange with St. Petersburg of explanations the most satisfactory. The war once made, the dates were disguised by publishing the papers in separate books, and by making them appear with an inverted order of dates and at intervals of time. That which had to be concealed was the connivance between two Ministers, the English and the Russian, in order to make DosT MOHAMMED pass as the ally of Russia. Under this pretext an English army was sent to Cabul to dethrone that Prince, and that country was thrown into the arms of Russia. This object was accomplished not only by suppressions, but by positive forgeries committed in the despatches of the British Envoy at Cabul before they were delivered to the public.

So true it is that a war, the causes of which have been previously concealed, cannot be understood afterwards; and so true also is it that that which is so easy to understand when the question is how to pre.. vent it, becomes unexplainable after it has been done.

But, it will be said, this matter only relates to barbarians with whom common rights (the words of Sir ROBERT PEEL) are not observed. I pass then to the wars made by England with France, in which the same process will be found.