From the forced repentance of invalid mutineers and disbanded thieves you can hope for no resource.  Government itself, which ought to constrain the more bold and dexterous of these robbers, is their accomplice.  Its arms, its treasures, its all are in their hands.  Judicature, which above all things should awe them, is their creature and their instrument.  Nothing seems to me to render your internal situation more desperate than this one circumstance of the state of your judicature.  Many days are not passed since we have seen a set of men brought forth by your rulers for a most critical function.  Your rulers brought forth a set of men, steaming from the sweat and drudgery, and all black with the smoke and soot, of the forge of confiscation and robbery,—­ardentis massae fuligine lippos,—­a set of men brought forth from the trade of hammering arms of proof, offensive and defensive, in aid of the enterprises, and for the subsequent protection, of housebreakers, murderers, traitors, and malefactors,—­men, who had their minds seasoned with theories perfectly conformable to their practice, and who had always laughed at possession and prescription, and defied all the fundamental maxims of jurisprudence.  To the horror and stupefaction of all the honest part of this nation, and indeed of all nations who are spectators, we have seen, on the credit of those very practices and principles, and to carry them further into effect, these very men placed on the sacred seat of justice in the capital city of your late kingdom.  We see that in future you are to be destroyed with more form and regularity.  This is not peace:  it is only the introduction of a sort of discipline in their hostility.  Their tyranny is complete in their justice; and their lanterne is not half so dreadful as their court.

One would think, that, out of common decency, they would have given you men who had not been in the habit of trampling upon law and justice in the Assembly, neutral men, or men apparently neutral, for judges, who are to dispose of your lives and fortunes.

Cromwell, when he attempted to legalize his power, and to settle his conquered country in a state of order, did not look for dispensers of justice in the instruments of his usurpation.  Quite the contrary.  He sought out, with great solicitude and selection, and even from the party most opposite to his designs, men of weight and decorum of character,—­men unstained with the violence of the times, and with hands not fouled with confiscation and sacrilege:  for he chose an Hale for his chief justice, though he absolutely refused to take his civic oaths, or to make any acknowledgment whatsoever of the legality of his government.  Cromwell told this great lawyer, that, since he did not approve his title, all he required of him was to administer, in a manner agreeable to his pure sentiments and unspotted character, that justice without which human society cannot subsist,—­that it was not his particular government, but civil order