Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/94

 published as widely as mine—you have been living under the roof with one of them, and in familiar intercourse with the rest for the last three or four years, and know their story like the alphabet—yet you think it is quite fair to ignore their cases—to ignore your friend John Martin's case, to ignore Thomas Meagher's and M'Manus's, who are at hand to answer for themselves; to ignore O'Brien's, the most conspicuous man among us, in order to fasten upon your accustomed quarry—myself. This is what you consider fair play and open dealing. Ah, Mr. Mitchel, I am ashamed of you!

"I now come to my own defence. I scorn to rest it upon precedent. I took the course I did, not because all my comrades had set me the example, but because it was the wisest, best, and boldest open to me at that hour. But you were a prisoner in Van Diemen's Land, and I refrained from specifying one of the chief motives of my elaborate defence. You, Mr. Mitchel, furnished that motive. The clumsy libels of Barrett and Birch might precipitate my conviction by ruining me with the jury. Your more subtle slanders, shaped to defame me with the people, weighed heavier on my mind. I had been silent under bitter provocation for the sake of the cause, but I was not poison proof. You had not utterly failed, and when I read in my cell in Newgate Barrett's base invention that I was 'about to plead guilty on the eve of O'Brien's trial,' I felt to the marrow of my bones that if any man believed the foul lie I owed it to you. I reviewed in my mind the battle I had maintained through a stormy era with the most unscrupulous of adversaries, the Castle hack and the Jacobin, and then, on that reflection, I determined to set my whole life before the jury and the country. I determined to snatch away the hobgoblin my enemies had laboured to create, and set an honest man in its place. So help me the good God that will judge me, I embarked in the movement of '48 believing that I had on one side the English gibbet if we failed, and on the other the hand of some fanatical assassin, whom your slanders would arm against me, if we succeeded. And on putting myself on my country by my defence, I was not alone answering Lord Clarendon I was answering you.

"This is your next charge, miraculously elicited from one