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with this precaution of silence that Trailie Arcklo, a relation of the
Earl of Ormond, was arrested at Kilmacaugh.
These captures of the body by the mere motion of justice represented
rather the mandat de comparution than the warrant of arrest. Sometimes
they were but processes of inquiry, and even argued, by the silence
imposed upon all, a certain consideration for the person seized. For the
mass of the people, little versed as they were in the estimate of such
shades of difference, they had peculiar terrors.
It must not be forgotten that in 1705, and even much later, England was
far from being what she is to-day. The general features of its
constitution were confused and at times very oppressive. Daniel Defoe,
who had himself had a taste of the pillory, characterizes the social
order of England, somewhere in his writings, as the "iron hands of the
law." There was not only the law; there was its arbitrary
administration. We have but to recall Steele, ejected from Parliament;
Locke, driven from his chair; Hobbes and Gibbon, compelled to flight;
Charles Churchill, Hume, and Priestley, persecuted; John Wilkes sent to
the Tower. The task would be a long one, were we to count over the
victims of the statute against seditious libel. The Inquisition had, to
some extent, spread its arrangements throughout Europe, and its police
practice was taken as a guide. A monstrous attempt against all rights
was possible in England. We have only to recall the Gazetier Cuirassé.
In the midst of the eighteenth century, Louis XV. had writers, whose
works displeased him, arrested in Piccadilly. It is true that George II.
laid his hands on the Pretender in France, right in the middle of the
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