Volume 1

Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania / By the Rev. Thos. Smart Hughes.

  • Thomas Smart Hughes
Date:
1820
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania / By the Rev. Thos. Smart Hughes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the representative system of government. In this state of things the experiment of a political regeneration was attempted; but ,the pure blood of the English constitution refused to, mix with the corrupt mass of the Sicilian state ; and it was found impracticable , to engraft an enlightened code of laws. upon a nation immersed in jgnorance, superstition, and immorality. Whether jt is necessary. that the consti- tution of a state, like that of the human frame, should grow up by degrees to strength, and pass through the stages of infancy and youth before it arrives at the maturity of manhood, it is. difficult to deter- mine: but it would seem that both political and moral coustitutions owe many of their characters to physical causes and the peculiarities of climate; and though it would be wrong to yield so far to the doc- trine of temperament as to measure national virtues and vices by parallels of latitude, yet such is found to be the ardent and inflam- matory temper of the more southern tribes, that they s seem absolutely, to deliberative assembly seems better. suited to a eters ee where no violent ebullitions of passion destroy the dignity of debate, or excite measures of impulse rather than of reflection. In the moral as well as in the natural world there is an inexhaustible variety of good, which constitutes perhaps ; the greatest charm of ex- istence ; and, though it must be confessed, that no form of government has ever been deyised, so admirably calculated to secure the blessings of social order as the British constitution, yet it does not follow that the rights of civil liberty may not be secured by a different organiza- tion of power more adapted to the peculiar character of a people. Be this as it may, no words can describe the scenes which daily oc- curred upon the introduction of the representative system in Sicily. The house of parliament, neither moderated by discretion nor con- ducted with dignity, bore the semblance of a receptacle for lunatics, instead of a council-room for legislators ; ; and the disgraceful scenes so often enacted at the hustings in England, were here transferred to the 2
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