GENERAL D'ALBIACS LAW.
" That ith the sword:. BOBADIL.
WHEN Chief Justice TINDAL was represented as saying that the law authorized the military, acting as military, under regular command and using deadly offensive weapons, to interfere to dis- perse a mob, and on their refusal, to shoot them, we said, and we now repeat, not that Chief Justice TINDAL'S law was unsound, but that the opinion ascribed to him was unsound, unconstitu- tional, and detestable. In point of fact, the Chief Justice gave no such opinion, nor was any such opinion ever given by any judge. All that he and his predecessors asserted was, the somewhat trite fact, that a man, by putting on a red coat or a blue one, does not cease to be a citizen—that in all cases where a citizen may lawfully -use a loaded musket with a bayonet at the end of it, against a mob, a soldier may take the same liberty. It is quite obvious, that be- cause any man may shoot a felon—taking alwaysthe risk of being Imaged if he fall to prove that the person shot was actually a felon, and that he was right in shooting him—it does not follow that an officer and soldiers, acting under command and in combina- tion, have the slightest right to shoot for the purpose of dispersing a mob of felons without the preliminaries that the law requires and the presence and authority of a magistrate. Although any man, whether soldier or civilian, may and ought to interfere to prevent the commission of a felony, because for such a purpose the common law invests every free man with the authority of a constable, no set of men, military or civil, have any right to com- bine together to preserve the King's peace. The time may be too brief, the occasion too urgent, to admit of the delay necessary for an application to the constituted authorities; and therefore the law makes allowance for the irregular exercise of the right of a peace- officer by an individual : but combination implies leisure and preparation, and these existing, there is no reason why legal au- thorization shauld not be had also.
The Protestant riots in Lord GEORGE GORDON'S time have often been alluded to as a precedent in favour of the military acting without authority from a magistrate ; but they afford. none. It is true, in that celebrated case, the military had not the orders of an inferior magistrate to sanction their proceedings : but they had the express orders of the supreme magistrate. The King is not only the head of the military, but of the civil force of the empire; and his orders are in all respects as valid when given in the one capacity as in the other. His Ministers are indeed responsible in every case where the King, as in the riots of 1780, orders the mili- tary to attack the people ; and had Parliament been so minded, they might have been made responsible for the orders then given. There are indeed supposable cases, in which a colonel at the head of his regiment, or a captain at the head of his troop, might do right in attacking and dispersing a mob contrary to the authority of a magistrate, and much more without it: in the same way, there are supposable cases in which assassination would be no crime. But the law does not contemplate such extremities. When they occur, they bring their vindication with their necessity. Notwithstanding, therefore, the positive tone with which Ge- neral IYALBIAC announces the law, and notwithstanding his con- fident reliance on Sir JAMES MANSFIELD, Lord ELLENBOROUGH, and Chief Justice TINDAL, we still must counsel him, seriously and soberly, to think well, in his future military career, how he attempt to reduce his maxims to practice. Hanging is no light matter; and if he should take into his head to shoot, or order others to shoot, the first mob that he may conceive to be feloniously occu- pied or inclined, without what he seems to consider the unneces- sary form of having recourse to the civil authority, he will find his neck in a noose that all the subtlety of all the Chief Justices that ever sat in King's Bench or the Common Pleas will not suffice to deliver him from.
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