Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/139

CURRAN of these wretched travelers how few ever did return!

But of that flagrant abuse this Statute has laid the ax to the root. It prohibits the abuse; it declares such detention or removal illegal; it gives an action against all persons concerned in the offense, by contriving, writing, signing, countersigning such warrant, or advising or assisting therein. Are bulwarks like these ever constructed to repel the incursions of a contemptible enemy? Was it a trivial and ordinary occasion which raised this storm of indignation in the Parliament of that day? Is the ocean ever lashed by the tempest, to waft a feather, or to drown a fly? By this Act you have a solemn legislative declaration, "that it is incompatible with liberty to send any subject out of the realm, under pretense of any crime supposed or alleged to be committed in a foreign jurisdiction, except that crime be capital." Such were the bulwarks which our ancestors placed about the sacred temple of liberty, such the ramparts by which they sought to bar out the ever-toiling ocean of arbitrary power; and thought (generous credulity!) that they had barred it out from their posterity forever. Little did they foresee the future race of vermin that would work their way through those mounds, and let back the inundation!

I am not ignorant, my lord, that the extraordinary construction of law against which I contend has received the sanction of another court, nor of the surprise and dismay with which it 129