Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/344

 The moment judgment was delivered we declared ourselves ready for trial. But your Lordship's officials would not consent. They had got another " short cut." The ordinary course of the law would not do for a man honoured by your Lordship's enmity. They insisted that I should BE SENTENCED WITHOUT TRIAL. This demand had a bare shadow of precedent. In misdemeanour cases, where punishment is trifling, it is the practice, if a man demur to the indictment, that he does so at the penalty of conviction in case his demurrer is overruled—that is to say, he is compelled practically to declare "your charge is well founded, but you have not made it according to law." If he shows that they have not made it according to law the indictment fails; if he does not succeed in showing this, he is sentenced as if he had been convicted in due course by a jury. But in trials for high treason a man may demur and plead afterwards, as the case involves results too serious to be risked on the whim of a judge. Treason-felony naturally followed the same rule. But the Attorney-General insisted that it should not; insisted that I must be transported, and transported on an indictment three-fourths of which were declared to be bad in law.

After long delays and portentous ponderings, running over three weeks, the Court at last had to pronounce that the thing could not be done—that I must, in fact, be tried, and even convicted, before I was sentenced!

And now, at last, on the 18th of January, I pleaded "not guilty," and declared myself ready for trial. In fact my counsel were eager to have me tried on the broken indictment, which shut out certain damaging evidence. But the learned judges would not consent. A month had already been spent, and they were tired of the business. Perhaps, too, a broken indictment was not considered quite the instrument fit to give me the coup de grace. They peremptorily refused to sit longer at that Commission. I insisted that the delay had been their own fault, made up of short sittings and long adjournments—that I had been six months in prison, and I required to be tried at once. But gruff Perrin grunted a savage negative and the Court adjourned to its Christmas holidays a little past date. And so once again, by the mercy