Had I thought you that base and vile instrument, attuned by hope and by fear into discord and falsehood, from whose vulgar string no groan of suffering could vibrate, no voice of honor or integrity could speak, let me honestly tell you I should have scorned to fling my hand across it—I should have left it to a fitter minstrel. If I do not, therefore, grossly err in my opinion of you, I could use no language, upon such a subject as this, that must not lag behind the rapidity of your feelingsand that would not disgrace these feelings in attempting to describe them. Gentlemen, I am not unconscious that the learned counsel for the crown seemed to address you with a confidence of a very different kind; he seemed to expect a kind of respectful sympathy from you with the feelings of the Castle, and the griefs of chided authority. Perhaps, gentlemen, he may know you better than I do. If he does, he has spoken to you as he ought; he has been right in telling you that, if the reprobation of this writer is weak, it is because his genius could not make it stronger; he has been right in telling you that his language has not been braided and festooned as elegantly as it might; that he has not pinched the miserable plaits of his phraseology, nor placed his patches and feathers with that correctness of millinery which became so exalted a person. If you agree with him, gentlemen of the jury-if you think that the man who ventures, at the hazard of his own life, to rescue from the deep the drowning honor of his country, must not presume upon the guilty familiarity of plucking it by the locks, I have no more to say. Do a courteous thing. Upright and honest jurors, find a civil and obliging verdict against the printer. And when you have done so, march through the ranks of your fellow-citizens to your own homes, and bear their looks as they pass along; retire to the bosom of your families, and when you are presiding over the morality of the parental board, tell your children, who are to be the future men of Ireland, the history of this day. Form their young minds by your precepts, and confirm those precepts by your own example. Teach them how discreetly allegiance may be

perjured on the table, or loyalty be foresworn in the jury-box. And when you have done so, tell them the story of Orr-tell them of his captivity, of his children, of his crime, of his hopes, of his disappointments, of his courage, and of his death. And when you find your little hearers hanging upon your lips, when you see their eyes overflow with sympathy and sorrow, and their young hearts bursting with the pangs of anticipated orphanage, tell them that you had the boldness and the justice to stigmatize the monster who had dared to publish the transaction!"

ON THE PROSECUTIONS AGAINST THE PRESS.

"The learned counsel has been pleased to say that he comes forward, in this prosecution, as the real advocate for the liberty of the press, and to protect a mild and merciful government from its licentiousness; and he has been pleased to add that the Constitution can never be lost while its freedom remains, and that its licentiousness alone can destroy that freedom. As to that, gentlemen, he might as well have said that there is only one mortal disease of which a man can die. It can die the death inflicted by tyranny; and when he comes forward to extinguish this paper in the ruin of the printer by a state prosecution, in order to prevent its dying of licentiousness, you must judge how candidly he is treating you, both in the fact and in the reasoning. Is it in Ireland, gentlemen, that we are told that there is only one disease that can be mortal to the press? Has he heard of nothing else that may be fatal to the freedom of publication? I know not whether the printer of the Northern Star may have heard of such things in his captivity, but I know that his wife and children are well apprised that a press may be destroyed in the open day, not by its own licentiousness, but by the licentiousness of a military force. As to the sincerity of the declaration that the state has prosecuted in order to assert the freedom of the press, it starts a train of thought, of melancholy retrospect and direful prospect, to which I did not think

that the learned counsel would have wished to commit your minds. It leads you naturally to reflect at what times, from what motives, and with what consequences, the government has displayed its patriotism by prosecutions of this sort. As to the motives, does history give you a single instance in which the state has been provoked to these conflicts, except by the fear of truth and by the love of vengeance? Have you ever seen the rulers of any country bring forward a prosecution, from motives of filial piety, for libels upon their departed ancestors? Do you read that Elizabeth directed any of these state prosecutions against the libels which the divines of her time had written against her Catholic sister, or against the other libels which these same gentlemen had written against her Protestant father? No, gentlemen, we read of no such thing; but we know she did bring forward a prosecution from motives of personal resentment, and we know that a jury was found time-serving and mean enough to give a verdict which she was ashamed to carry into effect. I said the learned counsel drew you back to the times that have been marked by these miserable conflicts. I see you turn your thoughts to the reign of the second James. I see you turn your eyes to those pages of governmental abandonment, of popular degradation, of expiring liberty, and merciless and sanguinary persecution-to that miserable period in which the fallen and abject state of man might have been almost an argument in the mouth of the atheist and the blasphemer against the existence of an all-just and an all-wise First Cause, if the glorious era of the Revolution that followed it had not refuted the impious inference, by showing that, if man descends, it is not in his own proper motion; that it is with labor and with pain; and that he can continue to sink only until, by the force and pressure of the descent, the spring of his immortal faculties acquires that recuperative energy and effort that hurries him as many miles aloft-he sinks, but to rise again. It is at that period that the state seeks for shelter in the destruction of the press: it is in a period like that

that the tyrant prepares for an attack upon the people, by destroying the liberty of the press-by taking away that shield of wisdom and of virtue, behind which the people are invulnerable-in whose pure and polished convex, ere the lifted blow has fallen, he beholds his own image, and is turned into stone. It is at those periods that the honest man dares not speak, because truth is too dreadful to be told; it is then humanity has no ears, because humanity has no tongue. It is then the proud man scorns to speak, but, like a physician baffled by the wayward excesses of a dying patient, retires indignantly from the bed of an unhappy wretch, whose ear is too fastidious to bear the sound of wholesome advice, whose palate is too debauched to bear the salutary bitter of the medicine that might redeem him, and therefore leaves him to the felonious piety of the slaves that talk to him of life, and strip him before he is cold."

ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF INFORMERS.

"I tell you, therefore, gentlemen of the jury, it is not with respect to Mr. Orr that your verdict is now sought; you are called upon, on your oaths, to say that the government is wise and merciful; that the people are prosperous and happy; that military law ought to be continued; that the British Constitution could not with safety be restored to this country; and that the statements of a contrary import, by your advocates in either country, are libelous and false. I tell you these are the questions; and, I ask you, can you have the front to give the expected answer in the face of a community who know the contrary as well as you do? Let me ask you how you could reconcile with such a verdict the jails, the tenders, the gibbets, the conflagrations, the murders, the proclamations, that we hear of every day in the streets, and see every day in the country? What are the processions of the learned counsel himself, circuit after circuit? Merciful God! What is the state of Ireland, and where shall you find the wretched inhabitant of the land? You may find him, per

haps, in jail, the only place of security-I had almost said, of ordinary habitation; you may see him flying by the conflagration of his own dwelling, or you may find his bones bleaching in the green fields of his country, or he may be found tossing upon the surface of the ocean, and mingling his groans with those tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home. And yet, with these facts ringing in the ears and staring in the face of the prosecutor, you are called upon to say, on your oaths, that these facts do not exist. You are called upon, in defiance of shame, of truth, of honor, to deny the sufferings under which you groan, and to flatter the persecution that tramples you under foot. But the learned gentleman is further pleased to say that the traverser has charged the government with the encouragement of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and upon the solemnity of your oaths. You are upon your oaths to say to the sister country that the government of Ireland uses no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers. Let me ask you honestly, what do you feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict which every man of us, and every man of you, know, by the testimony of your own eyes, to be utterly and absolutely false? I speak not now of the public proclamation of informers, with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward; I speak not of the fate of those horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory; I speak of what your own eyes have seen, day after day, during the course of this commission, from the box where you are now sitting; the number of horrid miscreants who avowed, upon their oaths, that they had come from the seat of government--from the Castle-where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows; that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these cata