Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/260

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS with Houston, planning with Pigott, and bargaining with Delaney how best to reawaken in the English mind the old hate and jealousy and fear of a people who were to be depicted in its columns in the most odious and repulsive character that forgers' or libelers' mercenary talent could delineate in "Parnellism and Crime."

This story will exhibit these men sitting in the editorial rooms of Printing House Square, with professions of loyalty on their lips and poison in their pens; with "honesty" loudly proclaimed in articles which salaried falsehood had written; with simulated regard for truth, making "Shame ashamed" of their concocted fabrications.

And these men, with the salaries of the rich in their pockets and the smiles of London society as their reward, now carry on a deliberately planned system of infamous allegation against political opponents who were but striving to redeem the sad fortunes of their country in efforts to bring to an end a strife of centuries' duration between neighboring nations and peoples.

Between the Times on the one hand, and the accused on the other, your lordships are, however, first to judge. It is, if I may say so without presumption, as serious and momentous a duty as judges of England were ever called upon to perform. The traditions of your lordships' exalted position, elevated as that position is above the play of political passion, of the 250