The Express.
London, England, 1851-07-19 00:00:00

Vie ervreoo.

TO CORRISPONDENTIL

• atm& Maks et " The Fspepe," ieekladad •Ite sae ireeeteee
Oasetta,* pebiklied mu Tuesday mad May eight, la time
kr set.
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sad be at the Ciette, 10, Ileuveria-eded, Tire diddle ea the
day el yelidestiee.

EMIR WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
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Toaisawaw—Meniag, 19.% Afteressa. 61. I.

LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 19.

WE have sometimes bad occasion to express our j
dissent from the policy advocated by Mr. GLAD-
/TONE, and not unfrequently from the mode in which
his peculiar views have been sustained. We have
thought him too little disposed to judge of the pre-
rut and the actual by the standard of the time, and
too prone to revert to obsolete principles and super-
seded ways of dealing with the wants and wishes of
the onward world. But we rejoice whenever we
can hail in the right honourable gentleman an ad.
vocate of progress or an opponent of oppression. To
the cause of free industry, Mr. GLADSTONE has ren-
dered valuable services; and to the cause of a foreign
policy worthy of a free country, we trust that he will
yet contribute by his eloquent tongue and pen in an
eminent degree. The foreign policy of every repre-
sentative government must in the main be the re-
flection of public opinion ; but as there is no subject
on which public opinion is so apt to err through ig-
norance or false information, so there is none regard-
ing which a man of inquiring mind and courageous
utterance may do more good by timely admonition
and instruction.
Mr. GLADSTONE appears well inclined to perform
this duty with respect to Italian affairs. It was but the
ether day that he placed before English readers M.
PARINI'S history of the Roman state. In the unpreten.
tow character of a translator, there was little room for
the display of his characteristic powers of thought
or of expression. But we have now before us a very
different, and—in one sense—a far more important
production of his pen. In a letter on the present
condition of things in the kingdom of Naples, ad-
dressed to Lord ABERDEEN, we have an exposure of
cruelty and corruption, and a denunciation of all that
tends to give the existing system countenance or en-
couragement, worthy of the most liberal of our
politicians. Mr. GLADSTONE was an eye-witness
of many of the odious incidents ho narrates.
He was present at the state trials of last year,
and thus had an opportunity. of carefully observing
the temper. in which political justice is administered, •
and of estimating the effect likely to be produced by
severity. of punishment. With the astuteness of
observation, and subtlety in analysis, by which his
mind is distinguishable from that of his contcmpo-
ngics, the Oxford dialectician scrutinised the evi-
dence adduced by the public prosecutor, and weighed
the proofs, generally circumstantial rather than of
conflicting personal testimony, urged on behalf of
the accused. Publicity of trial is one of the last
relics of Italian freedom still preserved at Naples and
elsewhere throughout the Peninsula. Hence it is
impossible for the partiality, insolence, and chicane
of those who desecrate the iudgrnent seat to pass
unobserved, although the chronicle of its crimes can
only be published in a distant land, and in a foreign
tongue. Dark and damning is that chronicle u
epitomised by the ex-Secretary of the Colonies.
Bitter and withering is the scorn outpoured on the
baseness of that Austrianism, in tacit complicity with
whose guilt Mr. GLADSTONE honourably shrinks
from being involved.
The history of reaction at Naples is briefly told.
Apparently with the design of precipitating revolu-
tion in the territories of his neighbours, FERDINAND
the FALSE, in the spring of 18-18, suddenly. announced
himself as a convert to constitutionalism in the most
liberal sense. His old advisers were dismissed,
and a cabinet of reforming nobles, advocates and
others was installed in their room. The king was
loud in protestations of confidence in his emancipated
subjects, and vows of zeal for the liberation of Italy
from the barbarian. A representative chamber was
summoned, and for some weeks it was allowed to
deliberate and inquire into the accumulated abuses
that from 182'2 had remained wholly undisturbed.
Symptoms of distrust and insincerity speedily ap-
peared; and a belief grew general that counter-revo-
lutionary designs were harboured by the court. The
chamber called upon the sovereign to put an end to
these dangerous and defamatory doubts by formally
swearing fidelity to the constitution. FERDINAND re-
fused; the ministers resigned; the representative body
was dismissed • and the angry remonstrances of the
citizens were ;nude the pretext for the memorable
butchery and rapine to which Naples was devoted by
its most religious and gracious monarch, during
the space of many days. The constitution and all
that adhered or were suspected of adherence thereto,

thenceforth appeared no more.
Elsewhere the rigours of reaction seem to have
been in some degree assuaged by time. As despot-
ism regained confidence its activity in vengeance ap-
pears to have relaxed, and its thinotof political blood-
shed to have been slaked. In Naples, on the contrary,
a more intense appetite for persecution and proscrip-
tion seems to have grown upon the hated king and
his hated minions, according us the term of their im-
punity in evil has been from month to month pro-
longed. At first the most notable of the ultra-
liberals, the loose talkers and threateners of popular
resentment, and the few who were supposed to hold
influential rank among the secret societies, engrossed
the attention of the police and their judicial accom-
plices. But as the original lists of victims were ex-
hausted, the sphere of accusation grew wider, and
the amount of testimony requisite to satisfy the willing
tribunals became daily less and less. Mr. GLADSTONE
dwells with honest horror, and consigns to lasting
infamy the scandalous unfairness of the whole pro-
cedure in cases of alleged conspiracy and sedition.
Trumpery tales of lawless words spoken or written,
unproved imputations of intimacy with revolutionists,
and unsubstantiated allegations of knowledge of their
assumed designs-, the evidence of notorious spies
filling their allotted corners in the great Aceldama, I
forged documents of every description, produced
without hesitation, and when exposed laid aside
without apology or shame,—above all, and worse
than all, the undisguised partisanship of the bench,
over-ruling objections, browbeating witnesses, inter-
rupting advocates, and stimulating perjury by open
encouragement,—these are the fearful and revolting
filatures most prominent in the picture, or rather
the graphic cartoon which Mr. GLADSTONE has
drawn.
Then follow the punishments—cruel, ingenious,
loathsome, and unmanly. In noisome and pestilen-
tial cells, chained together night and day, with
scanty food, no medicine, and hardly sufficient air to
prolong their sense of suffering, men of family, of
letters, of pure lives, of delicate health and suscepti-
ble minds, are in hundreds at the present hour en-
during the sentence of slow death for offences, of
which, probably, not one in twenty has ever been
legally convicted, even according to Neapolitan law,
and for which in any civilised country they would
be at worst condemned to a limited term of re-
straint, in a manner nowise tending to humiliate,
deride, or destroy them. We say this, puteint
aside altogether, for the moment, the
weightier consideration whether, against melt sn
inhuman tyranny, it is possible to conceive the per-
petration of any offence which consists in the
avowal of reprobation of its practices, sad abhor-
mace of its spirit.

Ws are inclined to think that the House of COlO-
mons, last Tuesday, by adopting Mr. CARDWELL'S
clause with regard to advocacy in the county courts,
took the course which will prove at once most bene-
ficial to the public and most fair to both branches di
the legal profession.
The ease, as we understand it, stands shortly
thus :—By a certain clause in the original County