Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/285

 "At a meeting in the beginning of April, Dillon directed public attention anew to our actual aims. There were Republicans in the Confederation, but it ought to be clearly understood that the object of that body was not the establishment of a Republic, but the Legislative Independence of Ireland; nor was its policy agrarian insurrection, but the creation of a Council of Three Hundred to represent the entire nation; and armament was recommended that the people might be in a position to defend their rights from aggression. Mr. John O'Hagan, in the only public speech he delivered in that era, seconded Dillon's purpose. He moved a resolution repudiating the statement of Lord John Russell that the Confederation promoted social disorder, or desired violent separation from England. Their aim was the Legislative Independence of Ireland, and thereby the attainment of social order, and they desired that such independence might be attained, if possible, without war. For his part, he advocated this policy because he detested anarchy from his soul. But starvation, rack-rents, and eviction, the absence of trade and manufactures, a government without root or base in the confidence of the people, was not social order. The bloody three-act tragedy so often performed in this unhappy country—the peasant flung out to perish by the wayside, the landlord murdered, the assassin dying on a gibbet—was not order, but anarchy."

Lord John Russell declared in the House of Commons that never had treason so naked been spoken in any country as in Ireland of late, and as a necessary sequence State prosecutions were ordered. I have postponed noticing that before the mission to France O'Brien and Meagher were indicted for recent speeches, and Mitchel for writings in the United Irishman, Had MitchePs doctrine, that Dublin jurors would no longer convict at the instance of the Crown, been well founded, here was an opportunity for a signal triumph; but he pleaded what is called a "dilatory plea," and postponed his trial, which in the end never came off. Meagher and O'Brien closed with the prosecution. In each case one juror refused to convict and a second trial was threatened. Meagher and O'Brien gave bail to appear when called upon,