32

HISTORY OF ENGLAND,

CHAP.

I.

cording to law no Englishman could be arrested or detained inconfinement merely by the mandate of the sovereign. In fact,persons obnoxious to the government were frequently impri-soned without any other authority than a royal order. Accord-ing to law, torture, the disgrace of the Roman jurisprudence,could not, in any circumstances, be inflicted on an Englishsubject. Nevertheless, during the troubles of the fifteenthcentury, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was occa-sionally used under the plea of political necessity. But itwould be a great error to infer from such irregularities thatthe English monarchs were, either in theory or in practice,absolute. We live in a highly civilised society, in which in-telligence is so rapidly diffused by means of the press and ofthe post office, that any gross act of oppression committed inany part of our island is, in a few hours, discussed by millions.If the sovereign were now to immure a subject in defiance ofthe writ of Habeas Corpus, or to put a conspirator to the tor-ture, the whole nation would be instantly electrified by thenews. In the middle ages the state of society was widelydifferent. Rarely and with great difficulty did the wrongs ofindividuals come to the knowledge of the public. A manmight be illegally confined during many months in the castleof Carlisle or Norwich; and no whisper of the transactionmight reach London. It is highly probable that the rack hadbeen many years in use before the great majority of the nationhad the least suspicion that it was ever employed. Nor wereour ancestors by any means so much alive as we are to the im-portance of maintaining great general rules. We have beentaught by long experience that we cannot without dangersuffer any breach of the constitution to pass unnoticed. It istherefore now universally held that a government which un-necessarily exceeds its powers ought to be visited with severeparliamentary censure, and that a government which, underthe pressure of a great exigency, and with pure intentions, has