It is likewise a shocking abuse to give the appellation of high treason to
an action that does not deserve it. By an imperial law
[17]
it was decreed that those who called in question the prince's judgment, or
doubted the merit of such as he had chosen for a public office, should
be prosecuted as guilty of sacrilege.
[18]
Surely it was the cabinet council and the prince's favourites who invented that crime. By another
law, it was determined that whosoever made any attempt to injure the
ministers and officers belonging to the sovereign should be deemed
guilty of high treason, as if he had attempted to injure the sovereign
himself.
[19]
This law is owing to two princes
[20]
remarkable for their
weakness — princes who were led by their ministers as flocks by
shepherds; princes who were slaves in the palace, children in the
council, strangers to the army; princes, in fine, who preserved their
authority only by giving it away every day. Some of those favourites
conspired against their sovereigns. Nay, they did more, they conspired
against the empire — they called in barbarous nations; and when the
emperors wanted to stop their progress the state was so enfeebled as to
be under a necessity of infringing the law, and of exposing itself to
the crime of high treason in order to punish those favourites.
And yet this is the very law which the judge of Monsieur de
Cinq-Mars built upon
[21]
when endeavouring to prove that the latter was
guilty of the crime of high treason for attempting to remove Cardinal
Richelieu from the ministry. He says: "Crimes that aim at the persons of
ministers are deemed by the imperial constitutions of equal consequence
with those which are levelled against the emperor's own person. A
minister discharges his duty to his prince and to his country: to
attempt, therefore, to remove him, is endeavouring to deprive the former
one of his arms,
[22]
and the latter of part of its power." It is
impossible for the meanest tools of power to express themselves in more
servile language.
By another law of Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius,
[23]
false coiners are declared guilty of high treason. But is not this confounding
the ideas of things? Is not the very horror of high treason diminished
by giving that name to another crime?
