Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/318

 out a shudder. If a convent were sacked in one place and its inmates violated; if a church were desecrated in another place; if in another a man's brains were dashed out or his throat cut; if anywhere some blasphemy uttered or some theory of organised plunder advanced—if there occurred an anti-social commotion among the canaille of the faubourgs or clubs of Paris, straightway these men, locked up in jail, were marked as the men who designed to introduce the same system and enact the same horrors in Ireland; straightway the Castle witch sent forth a direful howl and stretched out her long, brown, skinny arms to protect the altars and the homes of Irishmen from the demon assaults of Duffy and Meagher and the rest. The effect produced was really tremendous. The belief became very general among the readers of the Orange papers and the Evening Post that such must be the facts regarding the prisoners; they were stated so confidently, so circumstantially, so constantly."

One of the special lies that stung me floats still in my memory. Two young men named Moran were arrested for assaulting a policeman with a pistol and dagger, and the case was painted as one of shocking meanness and atrocity. It was immediately reported, at a safe distance, in the English papers, that they were well-known contributors to the Nation. By and by the "Morans of the Nation" became their ordinary title. I had never seen them, I had never heard of them, or from them, in my existence. They were as foreign to me as Prester John. How many of my jurors came into court believing them to be my colleagues and associates?

When these slanders were occupying every journal the Government could influence, my friends got the "Creed of the Nation" which was at this time an available brochure, sewed in among the advertisements attached to the Dublin University Magazine that it might vindicate the character of the Confederates among cultivated Unionists. It was merely setting up a finger post, but it was too much for the patience of the Castle. Colonel Browne, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered it to be torn out, and Mr. M'Glashan obeyed the order.

In the silence of my prison, meditating on the case, I was seized with the idea that there were two things I could do