Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6: With His Letters and JournalsMoore, Thomas
General
Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6: With His Letters and Journals
Moore, Thomas
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
fellow-countrymen are struggling with the extremes of hardships and
hunger, as your charity began abroad it should end at home. A much
less sum, a tithe of the bounty bestowed on Portugal, even if those
men (which I cannot admit without enquiry) could not have been
restored to their employments, would have rendered unnecessary the
tender mercies of the bayonet and the gibbet. But doubtless our
friends have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic
relief; though never did such objects demand it. I have traversed the
seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most
oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of
infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have
seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country. And
what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of
action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand
specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians, from the
days of Draco to the present time. After feeling the pulse and
shaking the head over the patient, prescribing the usual course of
warm water and bleeding, the warm water of your mawkish police, and
the lancets of your military, these convulsions must terminate in
death, the sure consummation of the prescriptions of all political
Sangrados. Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain
inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments
sufficient in your statutes? Is there not blood enough upon your
penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and
testify against you? How will you carry the bill into effect? Can you
commit a whole county to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet
in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? or will you proceed
(as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation? place
the county under martial law? depopulate and lay waste all around
you? and restore Sherwood Forest as an acceptable gift to the crown,
in its former condition of a royal chase and an asylum for outlaws?
Are these the remedies for a starving and desperate populace? Will
the famished wretch who has braved your bayonets be appalled by your
gibbets? When death is a relief, and the only relief it appears that
you will afford him, will he be dragooned into tranquillity? Will
that which could not be effected by your grenadiers, be accomplished
by your executioners? If you proceed by the forms of law, where is
your evidence? Those who have refused to impeach their accomplices,
when transportation only was the punishment, will hardly be tempted
to witness against them when death is the penalty. With all due
deference to the noble lords opposite, I think a little
investigation, some previous enquiry would induce even them to change
their purpose. That most favourite state measure, so marvellously
efficacious in many and recent instances, temporising, would not be
without its advantages in this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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