Treason they feel to
be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of
confiscation and attainder; his blood is attainted through six
generations; and nothing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the
block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What!
shall it be within benefit of clergy to delay the king's message on the
high road?--to interrupt the great respirations, ebb and flood,
_systole_ and _diastole_, of the national intercourse?--to endanger the
safety of tidings running day and night between all nations and
languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest of men, that the
bodies of the criminals will be given up to their widows for Christian
burial? Now, the doubts which were raised as to our powers did more to
wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty, than could have
been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from the Quarter
Sessions. We, on our parts (we, the collective mail, I mean), did our
utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which
we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a
sanction, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with that
sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent, in
each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as
one having authority.
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