Dr. Jameson was released from Holloway Prison late on Wednesday
evening by order of the Home Secretary, his condition, after a somewhat serious operation, causing some anxiety, and a very reasonable wish that he might be placed under less depressing and more stimulating conditions. It is said that, short as his term of imprisonment has been, he has suffered more from the curiosity and publicity to which he has been exposed than from the confinement or indignity itself. And if his character is really as full of reserve as it is said to be, that is very possible. On the other hand, he seems to have been nursed by one of his comrades, Sir John Willoughby, with a devotion and even tenderness that has tried greatly the physical powers of his friend, and this must have been some compensation for his own sufferings. At all events no one can say that the penalty in- flicted on him has been very severe for one of the greatest offences against the State,—the waging of private war against a friendly community,—that it is possible to conceive. All we can say in extenuation of it is that men who take their lives in their hands in uncivilised and barbarous countries, and regard themselves as modern knight-errants, are very apt to lose count of their moral longitude, as we may say, to consider themselves as the final judges of their own actions, and no longer as the subjects of a State to which they owe obedience.
Previous page
