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 were libellous 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 country 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 this land! You may find him, perhaps, in a 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 on 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 that every man of us, and every man of you, knows by the testimony of his 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 VOL. I.-30 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 very 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-[I speak of the well-known fact] that the mild and wholesome counsels of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness. Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked, when he entered, how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death—a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent. There was an antidote-a juror's oath-but even that adamantine chain, which bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth. Conscience swings from her mooring, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim: -Et quæ sibi quisque timebat, Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere." Gentlemen, I feel I must have tired your patience, but I have been forced into this length by the prosecutor, who has thought fit to introduce those extraordinary topics, and to bring a ques There were many government witnesses at this time, who so obviously perjured themselves in their testimony, that they were taken immediately to the crimi nal's box (the dock), and thence, on conviction, to the pillory, where they were sentenced to stand for their perjuries. tion of mere politics to trial, under the form of a criminal prosecution. I cannot say I am surprised that this has been done, or that you should be solicited by the same inducements and from the same motives, as if your verdict was a vote of approbation. I do not wonder that the government of Ireland should stand appalled at the state to which we are reduced. I wonder not that they should start at the public voice, and labor to stifle or to contradict it. I wonder not that at this arduous crisis, when the very existence of the empire is at stake, when its strongest and most precious limb is not girt with the sword for battle, but pressed by the tourniquet for amputation; when they find the coldness of death already begun in those extremities where it never ends, that they are terrified at what they have done, and wish to say to the surviving parties of that empire, " they cannot say that we did it." I wonder not that they should consider their conduct as no immaterial question for a court of criminal jurisdiction, and wish anxiously, as on an inquest of blood, for the kind acquittal of a friendly jury. I wonder not that they should wish to close the chasm they have opened by flinging you into the abyss. But trust me, my countrymen, you might perish in it, but you could not close it. Trust me, if it is yet possible to close it, it can be done only by truth and honor. Trust me, that such an effect could no more be wrought by the sacrifice of a jury than by the sacrifice of Orr. As a state measure, the one would be as unwise and unavailing as the other. But while you are yet upon the brink, while you are yet visible, let me, before we part, remind you once more of your awful situation. The law upon this subject gives you supreme dominion. Hope not for much assistance from his lordship. On such occasions, perhaps, the duty of the court is to be cold and neutral. I cannot but admire the dignity he has supported during this trial; I am grateful for his patience. But let me tell you it is not his province to fan the sacred flame of patriotism in the jury box. As he has borne with the little extravagances of the law, do you bear with the little failings of the press. Let me, therefore, remind you, that though the day may soon come when our ashes shall be scattered before the winds of heaven, the memory of what you do cannot die. It will carry down to your posterity your honor or your shame. In the presence, and in the name of that ever-living God, I do therefore conjure you to reflect that you have your charac ters, your consciences, that you have also the character, perhaps the ultimate destiny, of your country in your hands. In that awful name I do conjure you to have mercy upon your country and upon yourselves, and so to judge now as you will hereafter be judged; and I do now submit the fate of my client, and of that country which we yet have in common to your disposal. |