hings, though he was able to say
with literal truth that not a single statement of fact was made upon
Lacaita's credit. Mr. Gladstone saw Bourbon absolutism no longer in the
decorous hues of conventional diplomacy, but as the black and execrable
thing it really was,--'the negation of God erected into a system of
government.' Sitting in court for long hours during the trial of Poerio,
he listened with as much patience as he could command to the principal
crown witness, giving such evidence that the tenth part of what he heard
should not only have ended the case, but secured condign punishment for
perjury--evidence that a prostitute court found good enough to justify
the infliction on Poerio, not long before a minister of the crown, of
the dreadful penalty of four-and-twenty years in irons. Mr. Gladstone
accurately informed himself of the condition of those who for unproved
political offences were in thousands undergoing degrading and murderous
penalties. He contrived to visit some of the Neapolitan prisons, another
name for the extreme of filth and horror; he saw political prisoners
(and political prisoners included a large percentage of the liberal
opposition) chained two and two in double irons to common felons; he
conversed with Poerio himself in the bagno of Nisida chained in this
way; he watched sick prisoners, men almost with death in their faces,
toiling upstairs to see the doctors, because the lower regions were too
foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that professional men
would enter. Even these inhuman and revolting scenes stirred him less,
as it was right they should, than the corruptions of the tribunals, the
vindictive treatment for long periods of time of uncondemned and untried
men, and all the other proceedings of the government, 'desolating entire
classes upon which the life and growth of the nation depend,
undermining the foundation of all civil rule.' It was this violation of
all law, and of the constitution to which King Ferdinand had solemnly
sworn fidelity only a year or two before, that outraged him more than
even rigorous sentences and barbarous prison practice. 'Even on the
severity of these sentences,' he wrote, 'I would not endeavour to fix
attention so much as to draw it off from the great fact of illegality,
which seems to me to be the foundation of the Neapolitan system;
illegality, the fountain-head of cruelty and baseness and every other
vice; illegality which gives a bad conscienc