Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/338

 CHAPTER X

HOW DID GAVAN DUFFY ESCAPE CONVICTION?

are twelve judges in Ireland, my Lord, and I have stood before ten of them in succession to answer your indictments. There are but six Commissions of Oyer and Terminer in a year, and I was carried before five of them at your instance. One bill of indictment on one charge is the ordinary practice of criminal law; I answered five bills of indictment exhibiting the same charge, each in a new and aggravated form. It is hard, I think, that I must hold up my right hand at the public bar again to defend myself for the new offence of having defeated you. It is not magnanimous, my Lord, when I escaped your public prosecutors, to set your hired slanderers upon me. A noble heart would have scorned so poor a revenge. Nay, a noble heart, I think, would have been touched with sympathy for the last of a routed party, who, when the odds looked so terribly decisive, refused to despair of himself or his country. But you have acted after your nature, and I am the last man in the world to complain that your hired claque have dragged the history of '48 again before the world.

How did Gavan Duffy escape conviction? In your dispatch to Lord Shrewsbury you charged it on "the perjury of one of my jurors." Enthusiastic young barristers attributed it (and with good reason indeed) to the matchless skill and eloquence of my counsel. Good, easy men, content with the surface of things, assured each other in railway 320