Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/172

 of the men of '98, whom the Agitator had denounced as miscreants. Never did the result justify more triumphantly the selection of an advocate. The handsome and stately old man, venerable by years and services, rich in the confidence of his own order and the respect of the nation, opened the case by declaring that the prosecuted article was a natural, justifiable, and perfectly constitutional answer to the menace which had provoked it. He was glad to appear on behalf of a journal which had never been defiled by attacks on private character, but which with respect to public measures and public men took a determined course. He meant to found his defence in the present case on the fact that Ireland had been all along, and was at that hour, treated as a conquered country; and the people of a country so treated had certain natural rights, which were precisely the rights insisted upon in the prosecuted article.

The real 'meaning of the article indicted was that if the sword should be employed to put down opinion, and the railways used to facilitate the conveyance of troops for that purpose, resistance would be justifiable. And undoubtedly it would. This was the law of nature, and it was the constitution of the realm.

It was certain that if force were used for the purpose of stifling the voice as the people calling constitutionally for any particular measure, resistance under such circumstances would be justifiable.

This prosecution ought utterly to fail, and he did not ask their verdict as the boon of mercy, or the safety-valve of doubt, but as the unequivocal expression of their regard for the right of nature and the welfare and honour of their native land.

He proceeded to illustrate and justify these opinions from history and the text-books of constitutional law. The court was crowded with eager Nationalists, and we had the satisfaction of listening to the most powerful and lofty vindication ever addressed to an Irish audience of a movement for the deliverance of Ireland from abject and unlawful dependency. The noble effort of the eloquent old man attained a triumph