Many of these measures Lord Clarendon allows to have been most salutary; and few persons will, in our times, deny that, in the laws passed during this session, the good greatly preponderated over the evil.  The abolition of those three hateful courts, the Northern Council, the Star-Chamber, and the High Commission, would alone entitle the Long Parliament to the lasting gratitude of Englishmen.

The proceeding against Strafford undoubtedly seems hard to people living in our days.  It would probably have seemed merciful and moderate to people living in the sixteenth century.  It is curious to compare the trial of Charles’s minister with the trial, if it can be so called, of Lord Seymour of Sudeley, in the blessed reign of Edward the Sixth.  None of the great reformers of our Church doubted the propriety of passing an act of Parliament for cutting off Lord Seymour’s head without a legal conviction.  The pious Cranmer voted for that act; the pious Latimer preached for it; the pious Edward returned thanks for it; and all the pious Lords of the council together exhorted their victim to what they were pleased facetiously to call “the quiet and patient suffering of justice.”

But it is not necessary to defend the proceedings against Strafford by any such comparison.  They are justified, in our opinion, by that which alone justifies capital punishment or any punishment, by that which alone justifies war, by the public danger.  That there is a certain amount of public danger which will justify a legislature in sentencing a man to death by retrospective law, few people, we suppose, will deny.  Few people, for example, will deny that the French Convention was perfectly justified in placing Robespierre, St. Just, and Couthon under the ban of the law, without a trial.  This proceeding differed from the proceeding against Strafford only in being much more rapid and violent.  Strafford was fully heard.  Robespierre was not suffered to defend himself.  Was there, then, in the case of Strafford, a danger sufficient to justify an act of attainder?  We believe that there was.  We believe that the contest in which the Parliament was engaged against the King was a contest for the security of our property, for the liberty of our persons, for everything which makes us to differ from the subjects of Don Miguel.  We believe that the cause of the Commons was such as justified them in resisting the King, in raising an army, in sending thousands of brave men to kill and to be killed.  An act of attainder is surely not more a departure from the ordinary course of law than a civil war.  An act of attainder produces much less suffering than a civil war.  We are, therefore, unable to discover on what principle it can be maintained that a cause which justifies a civil war will not justify an act of attainder.