Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/349

 knowledge the same post which carried the Sheriff's summons to certain of those persons brought them also an invitation to some Viceregal hospitalities! This was making assurance doubly sure; it was worthy of your lordship's skill and precaution as a veteran diplomatist.

But you failed again. How did you fail with such admirable precautions, and rehearsals so numerous? Alas! "the extinguishers themselves took fire." The jurors who were to execute your will were part of that public which had risen in remonstrance against you. There is a point beyond which even Dublin jurors will not go.

The trial commenced; the panel was called over, and only seventy out of one hundred and seventy jurors answered to their names. It was called again on a heavy penalty—only ninety answered. Eighty special jurors refused by their absence to take any further part in your proceedings. Fines of £50 could not whip them to the box. The public feeling which had pronounced in the Press and in memorials, now pronounced in the very court, by this wholesale desertion of the middle classes.

Only ninety answered. The prisoner has a right to set aside twenty peremptorily. Here were twenty of the worst struck out at a blow. The list consisted, as I have said, of magistrates, grand jurors, &c. But no grand juror who had found an indictment against me could legally serve on my petty jury. It was beautiful to see the poetic justice executed on you for your repeated indictments, when man after man was set aside because he had acted on one or other of the grand juries which found true bills against me. Here was another huge gap in the list.

Three jurors were excused by the Court on the plea of ill-health—that accommodating sickness which seizes gentlemen who find it inconvenient to keep their appointments. They were sick, I presume, of " the Queen against Duffy."

Actual residence in Dublin is an essential qualification of a juror in treason-felony cases, but many of your special jurors lived in country houses in the suburbs—at Kingstown, Blackrock, Roebuck, and Rathfarnham. Here went a dozen more from the panel.