Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/346

 in the course of the trial a majority of the jurors were prepared to acquit me. Up to the end several jurors were determined to acquit on all the counts but the second. One juror persisted to the end in demanding a full acquittal. You have ventured, my Lord, in your private protocol to Lord Shrewsbury, to apply a hard and insolent word to his honest verdict. Let us see on what grounds it may have stood.

Jurors have claimed it as their inalienable right to pierce through the outward filaments of law and determine on the intrinsic justice of great cases. James II. could not coerce a jury to convict the seven Protestant bishops, though the letter of the law was plainly against them. Neither Stuart nor Cromwell could persuade juries to strike down John Lilburne, the Puritan. The statutes against duelling were as plain as the multiplication table, but juries are judges of the law as well as the fact, and of the equity as well as the law. And an Irish juror who consulted his conscience at that day might well pause to consider whether, on the whole, the true offender upon whom public justice ought to be executed stood at the bar or sat in the high places of the land.

Or, on a lower ground, the juror might well deem that already an ample penalty had been exacted. A year's close imprisonment counts, in the graduated scale of judicial sentences, as equal to seven years' transportation. I had already been seven months shut up in a prison described, in official reports, as "the worst in Europe." It was built on the burying-ground of an ancient monastery, and reeked with foul airs. My only outlet was a damp, narrow, funereal court, crossed in four paces, into which the sun never shone and where a nameless nuisance poisoned the air of heaven. I had paid an enormous fine in the loss of my whole property, between fraudulent debtors and the costs of a protracted defence. I had in fact paid a heavier fine, and endured a worse, if not a longer, imprisonment, than actual conviction would have incurred before the Treason Felony Act of April, '48.

You had put a case before the jury which they could not believe. You proved my handwriting by a witness who admitted he had sworn to it once before in error. You proved the barricades at Killenaule and the siege at