21 b HISTOKY OF GREECE. In order to appreciate the desperate hatred with which the exile Alkibiades afterwards revenged himself on his countrymen, it has been necessary to explain to what extent he had just ground of complaint against them. On being informed that they had condemned him to death in his absence, he is said to have exclaimed : " I shall show them that I am alive." He fully redeemed his word. 1 The recall and consequent banishment of Alkibiades was mis- chievous to Athens in several ways. It transferred to the charges, at least there is strong presumptive reason for believing that they were true. Persons were convicted and punished for having done acts which they really had done, and which they knew to be legal crimes. Whether it be right to constitute such acts legal crimes, or not, is another question. The enormity of the Popish Plot consisted in punishing persons for acts which they had not done, and upon depositions of the most lying and worthless witnesses. The state of mind into which the Athenians were driven after the cutting of the Hcrmae, was indeed very analogous to that of the English people during the circulation of the Popish Plot. The suffering, terror, and dis- traction, I apprehend to have been even greater at Athens : but the cause of it was graver and more real, and the active injustice which it produced was far less than in England. " I shall not detain the reader (says Dr. Lingard, Hist. Engl. xiii, p. 105) with a narrative of the partial trials and judicial murders of the unfortunate men, whose names had been inserted by Gates in his pretended discoveries. So violent was the excitement, so general the delusion created by the per- juries of the informer, that the voice of reason and the claims of justice were equally disregarded. Both judge and jury seemed to have no other object than to inflict vengeance on the supposed traitors. To speak in sup- port of their witnesses, or to hint the improbability of the informations, required a strength of mind, a recklessness of consequences, which falls to the lot of few individuals : even the king himself, convinced as he was of the imposture, and contemptuously as he spoke of it in private, dared not exercise his prerogative of mercy to save the lives of the innocent." It is to be noted that the House of Lords, both acting as a legislative tody, and in their judicial character when the Catholic Lord Stafford was tried before them (ch. vi, pp. 231-241), displayed a degree of prejudice and injustice quite equal to that of the judges and juries in the law-courts. Both the English judicature on this occasion, and the Milanese judica- ture on the occasion adverted to in a previous note, were more corrupted and driven to greater injustice by the reigning prejudice, than the purely popular dikastery of Athens in this affair cf the Hermac, and of the other profanations.
1 Plutarch. A] kil). c. 22.
