Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/11

 now insult him by the imputation of a tardy apostasy from the persistent principles of his life. We must not assume that some afterthought has brought over from the natural side of his sympathy and his service a pervert so illustrious as the prophet who long since denounced 'the soft quality of mercy' as 'thrice accursed' in all cases where it was not 'permissible,' and who in the same breath referred the question of when and where, if ever, it might be, to the ultimate and indisputable decision of a drunken murderer and of a whipper of women. Nor, again, unless the meaning of words can be juggled into its exact reverse by the most able and audacious of special pleaders, can it be out of respect for 'the hard quality of justice' that the adoring biographer of Frederic William would imprecate our execration on the Turk. For in this very instance of judicial murder he admits, with quaint and admirable candour, that the royal hangman was indeed a mere assassin of the innocent, his 'poor old' victim being afterwards proved to have been wholly and demonstrably, morally and legally, guiltless of the charge on which he was murdered. Really it grows more and more difficult for the sharpest eye of the most devout disciple to detect whereabouts in the prophetic mind of the North British evangelist he may discern the exact point at which tyranny or cruelty, torture or murder, violence or injustice, ceases to be something admirable and is transmuted as by witchcraft into something unspeakable. Cruelty in Ireland, cruelty in Jamaica, cruelty in the plantation, cruelty in the jail, each of these in