Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/347

, and asked the jury to convict me for them me! a prisoner in Newgate! On the highest grounds of public principle, on plainest practical equity, on the narrowest technical theory of his duty, a juror with a clear conscience might refuse you a verdict.

These four Commissions, resulting in four providential escapes, are directly traceable to the malignity and incapacity of your administration. At the rising of the Court, in February, I was sent back to prison, to await for eight weeks more the period of a new trial, and the chances of new judges and a new jury.

Happily there is a measure to public forbearance. Much had been borne in dumb submission, but indignation was gathering slowly in the public mind; and when I was recommitted for the fifth time, it burst out fierce and strong. Hatchell's foul tongue had swelled it, Perrin's secret tribunal had swelled it, the literary assassins—the Ryan-Pucks, the Birch-Pucks, and Barrett-Pucks of the Government Press had swelled it; and now the protracted and merciless imprisonment exploded it at last. Men began to declare openly that it was not a trial but an immolation. They saw

and they rushed forward to forbid the desecration.

Never, perhaps, was such a singular movement seen in any country on the earth as it elicited from a people broken with famine and disheartened by a recent and ignominious defeat. At the eve of the fourth Commission, the chief Catholic Corporations in Ireland, a host of Protestant and Catholic gentlemen, and seventy thousand of the people, memorialled against your practice of packing partisan juries. Memorialled against foul play in a court of justice! Memorialled that you would be generously pleased not to swindle me out of liberty, property, and life. It was, as the venerable Cloncurry wrote at the time, like a memorial against highway robbery organised by a Government. No civilised country had ever witnessed such a spectacle.

After my recommittal to prison ten thousand of the citizens