Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/321

 It was plain to me that unless I could stop this practice the result was foredoomed. Rumours reached me through my counsel that my conviction was essential to the happiness of persons in authority, and that no stone, and no reversible coat, would be left unturned to obtain it. To defeat the jury-packers would revive the public spirit like a battle won in the field. My counsel were determined to exhaust the resources of the law in impeding and barring the prosecution wherever the Crown employed illegitimate methods, but the political part of the contest lay outside their domain, and to that I applied myself. This policy was beset with difficulties. To get the misfeasance of the Administration exposed seemed nearly impossible. The journals which had narrowly escaped prosecution were naturally the most timid and cautious, and as the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended the editors could be sent to prison at the pleasure of the Castle. Frederick Lucas in the Tablet, and "An Irish Priest" in the same journal, in letters of singular force and lucidity, enlightened opinion wherever the Tablet circulated, but there was silence in Dublin. Meditating on the difficulty in prison, I thought of a device which proved very successful. I drafted a notice to the Attorney-General, in which, after insisting on a prisoner's right to a fair trial, I recited in careful detail what had been done by his orders in the trials already held, and warned him that I should not consider a trial by a jury fabricated by the Castle the fair trial I was entitled to by law, but a manifestly foul trial, and a fraud on the administration of justice.

This paper, which carefully preserved the form usual in legal notices, and was studded with facts, was copied widely