Trials for offences against the State have happily been almost unknown in this country, and we therefore find it difficult to conceive of the dangers to which a prisoner is exposed, when the whole power of the government is arrayed against him. But to one familiar with the iniquitous manner in which they were conducted in Great Britain during the seventeenth, and the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the proceedings against O'Connell and his associates seem almost models of judicial fairness and impartiality. To one not thus familiar, it is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the extent to which legal tribunals prostituted their functions to purposes of oppression and revenge. The judges holding their offices by the slight tenure of royal favor, and generally owing their elevation to the zeal they had shown to defend the royal prerogatives, were, with a few honorable exceptions, willing instruments in the hands of power. The interpreters of the law, who, like the prophets of old, were bound to curse, or to bless, in obedience to higher impulses than their own wills, became the mere mouth-pieces of the government; the injustice of the decisions imperfectly concealed by the sanctity of the office. Justice, and the favor of the court were identical. The law and the royal pleasure were inseparably associated in the mind of the judge. We would not be understood as meaning that the English judges were unjust, or partial in the trials between private citizens. In these cases it was not often that there was any obstacle interposed to the administration of even-handed justice. It was when the government came in as a party; when political offenders were to be tried, that they too often proved false to their trust. The temptations of office; the love of ease, wealth, and distinction; the fear of ministerial enmity, of royal disgrace, were too powerful for poor Honesty. The hour in which their aid was most needed by the friendless prisoner, was that in which it was withdrawn; for surely if men ever need an upright, able, and impartial administration of the law, it is when they contend single-handed against the influences of flattery, bribery, and intimidation, which those in authority are ever able to employ. The odds are fearful in such a contest. The prejudices of juries, the subservience of lawyers, the servility of judges, gave scarce a hope that justice would not be wrested to serve the purposes of the crown; that considerations of state policy would not prove stronger than any abstract belief of the prisoner's innocence or guilt. That we have not misrepresented the degraded condition of the English tribunals during the period we have mentioned, a reference to the state trials _passim_, will abundantly prove. Nor is it at all strange that such should have been the case. During the dynasty of the Tudors, and the reign of the first of the Stuarts, the duty alike of the courts, and of parliament was simply to register the royal edicts.