Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/341

 fellow-prisoners, when we met in the ghastly prison chapel on a Sunday morning, fancied the public gallows, which forms its principal window, was destined to open for my last exit from that edifice. For public opinion was still dumb, and defeat was interpreted to mean death. This was the First Commission. How I escaped on that occasion needs no more words.

There were many foul strokes in your duel with me, my Lord, but one of the foulest followed close on this transaction. For five entire weeks, and up to the day O'Brien was removed to Clonmel, my friends could obtain no definite information whether or not I should accompany him. The perpetual answer of the Attorney-General to my solicitor was that he had not determined. Long after his measures must have been taken, and up to the day O'Brien was removed to the south, I remained in total ignorance that I was not to be tried at the same Commission.

During all this time the fire of your literary police never ceased. After my arrest it increased in intensity. The language of a distinguished ecclesiastic, who in that hour of panic united the vigour and independence of Swift, painted it in words that will not die.

My friends made some effort to counteract this torrent of slander, but you out-manœuvred them. Some weeks before my arrest I had published the " Creed of the Nation" so that if I fell before the law or the sword my opinions might live. O'Brien, in a public letter, volunteered to adopt every sentiment of it, and the document had come to be, in some sort, the profession of faith of our party My friends caused this pamphlet to be republished with the Dublin University Magazine as a true statement of my opinions. But my true opinions were precisely what must not be published. Your police agent, Col. Brown, sent for certain of the Dublin booksellers, and caused them to cut it out of the magazine. My friends next ordered it to be reprinted in the Nation, where they fondly believed it beyond your control. But they were mistaken. They did injustice to the resources of your generous imagination. That number of the Nation you caused to be seized at the printing-office and confiscated. A single copy of it never reached the