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gossip of angry complaint, but from recorded decisions in law-books, printed as precedents for future guidance—such numerous cases of strange injustice, as shall satisfy all inquirers that oppression belongs to no sect and to no condition; but to the passions of men when uncontrolled by the laws which we frame, in a faint and imperfect copy of that serene and unswerving justice, which belongs to another world—not to this!
I speak bitterly I I feel bitterly: I have suffered bitterly. Is it, or is it not, a grating thought, that in a country so eager for justice, the last to benefit by that eagerness, are its own women? Is it, or is it not, a grating thought, that differences of religious opinion should give such interest to individual cases of hardship, that the letters of two young ladies, put into a Roman Catholic convent for education, by a Roman Catholic father, should be read to three hundred members of Parliament as a means of convincing, and arousing their minds to the consideration of one species of wrong; and that other wrongs, touching English justice so much more nearly, should be without even a possibility of remedy, by the provisions of English law?
Is it, or is it not, natural, that all the scandal of my own wrongs being revived—and my character resting on the directly contrary opinions of two men—I should seek to uphold my argument of legal injustice, by shewing the facts on which these scandals (by that injustice) arose?
One of these men, is the Prime Minister of England: high-minded, honourable, and intellectual—still quoted as authority by his colleagues, still remembered and lamented by his friends. He comforts me in the quarrel which ended in a separation between me and my husband, by bidding me remember, "That I had done everything to stave off that extremity as long as possible;" that I ought "not to be too anxious about rumours and the opinions of the world, for, being innocent and in the right, I must, in the end" (when is the end?), bring everything round;"— and that "it is vanity in me to say
