Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/170

 proposed public entry, and suggested that whatever compliment was paid to him should be combined with the celebration of the 6th of September, the day when the State prisoners had been released from Richmond. But before September arrived the Whigs were in office with the support of O'Connell, and O'Brien and O'Connell were separated for ever.

O'Connell was not left without Whig support in his designs against the Nation. Lord John Russell, then leader of the Opposition, and who was confident that he would soon be leader of the House by the aid of the Irish members, took occasion to express his contempt for the wicked journal which impeded so noble a purpose.

"There is a numerous body in Ireland (he said)—numerous even among her representatives—which says that no legislation of a united Parliament can devise fit remedies for Irish grievances, and that it is in a domestic Parliament alone that fit and wise legislation can be looked for. There are others, I fear, who, if I read rightly their sentiments as expressed in a newspaper—I will name—it called the Nation, which has great circulation in Ireland, who go beyond that question of the Legislative Union—who would wish not merely to have such a Parliament as that which it was the boast of Grattan to found, and which legislated under the sceptre of the same sovereign as the Parliament of Great Britain, but a party which excites every species of violence, which looks to disturbance as its means, and regards separation from England as its end."

It would be humiliating to defend a journal over which I watched as over my personal honour from such foul imputations. Among notable men of the period there probably could not be found one to adopt the calumnies of this meagre and frigid pedant. His imputations would not affect opinion in Ireland, but it might perchance win the vote of a stray Whig in the jury-box at the coming trial.

At last the day of my trial, the 6th of July, arrived. Nobody expected any other result than the conviction, for Blackburne, one of the most subtle, skilful, and vindictive of the Crown lawyers, had been raised to the Chief Justice-