that you would rivet on him, and he votes, wretch that he is, in conformity with the dictates of his conscience, and what he believes to be the ordinance of his religion. Alas for him! a month or two go by, and all that he has in the world is seized; the beast that gives him milk, the horse that drags his plough, the table of his scanty meal, the bed where anguish, and poverty, and oppression were sometimes forgotten-all, an are taken from him, and with Providence for his guide, but with God, I hope, for his avenger, he goes forth with his wife and children upon the world. And this, this is the system which you, and you, but I hope not you (turning to Lord John Russell) are prepared to maintain This is the system under which what is called a great trust is performed in the eyes of the country; this is the system under which, by the exercise of the great prerogative of freemen, open and undisguised, every British citizen invested with the franchise should feel himself exalted! Oh, fie upon this mockery! and if I cannot say fie upon them, what shall I say of the men who, with these things of a constant and perpetual occurrence staring them in the face, talk to us of the immorality of the ballot, and tell us, forsooth, that it is an un-English proceeding. Un-English! I know the value of that expressive and powerful word. I know the great attributes by which the people of this country are distinguished, and of the phrase which expresses the reverse of these habits, I can appreciate the full and potent signification. Fraud is indeed un-English, and dissimulation, and deception, and duplicity, and doubledealing, and promise-breaking, all, every vice akin to these vile things are indeed un-English; but tyranny, base, abominable tyranny, is un-English; hard-hearted persecution of poor fanatic wretches is un-English; crouching fear on one side, and ferocious menace and relentless savageness upon the other, are un-English! Of your existing system of voting these are the consequences; and to these evils, monstrous as they are, you owe it to your national character, to truth, to justice, to every consideration, political, social, religious, moral, at once to provide the cure. What shall it be? Public opinion! Public opinion! We have been hearing of it this long time-this many a day we have been hearing of public opinion. In the last ten years and upwards, whenever the ballot has been brought forward, we have been told, that for corruption, for intimidation, for everything, public opinion would supply the cure that marvellous and wonder-working principle, that sedative of the passions, that minister to the diseases of the mind, that alterative of the heart, was to extinguish cupidity, was to coerce ambition, allay the fears of the slave, mitigate the ferocity of the tyrant, and over all the imperfections of our nature to extend its soft and salutary sway. Well, how has it worked? Public opinion, so far as bribery is concerned, is given up; few, except the members for the University of Oxford and the University of Dublin, those amiable gentlemen, among whose virtues a peculiar indulgence for parliamentary frailties are conspicuous, would recommend that Southampton and Belfast, and the rest of the delinquent boroughs, should be consigned to public opinion. But if for bribery public opinion has lost all its sanitive operation, is it, in the name of common consistency, for

intimidation, that this specific is to be reserved? Upon bribery, of the two, public opinion would have the greater influence. To bribery there is attached some sort of discredit; but intimidation is not only openly practised, but ostentatiously avowed. Men do not deny, but take pride in it; they applaud themselves, too, for the wholesome severity which they have exercised, and the salutary examples they have made. So far, indeed, is the principle of intimidation carried, that a regular theory of coercion has been established, and the great patricians of the land compress their notions of their privileges into a phrase, to lay down the dogmas of despotism in some trite saying, and, in some familiar sentence, to propound the aphorisms of domination. When these doctrines are unrecanted in language, and in conduct are unrecalled when such doctrines are defended, vindicated, and applauded -when they are acted upon to an extent so vast that it is almost difficult to suggest where they have not been applied-how long, how much longer, are we to look to public opinion as the corrective of those evils, which, without the application of some more potent remedy, it is almost an imposture to deplore? Show me a remedy beside the ballot, and I will at once accede to it. Show me any other means by which the tenants of your estates and the retailers of your commerce, and all those whose dependence is so multifariously diversified, can be protected -show me any other means by which a few men of property, confederated in the segment of a divided county, shall be frustrated in conspiring to return your fractional county members-show me any other means by which this new scheme of nomination shall be baffled ad defeated-show me any other means by which a few leading entlemen in the vicinage of almost every agricultural borough shall be foiled in their dictation to those small tradesmen whose vote and interest are demanded in all the forms of peremptory solicitation. Show me this, and I give up the ballot. But if you cannot show me this-for the sake of your country, for the sake of your high fame; upon every motive, personal and public; from every consideration, national and individual-pause before you repudiate the means, the only means, by which the spirit of coercion now carried into a system shall be restrained, by which the enjoyment of the franchise shall be associated with the will, by which the country shall be saved from all the suffering, the affliction, and the debasement with which a general election is now attended; and without which, to a state of things most calamitous and most degrading, there is not a glimpse of hope, not a chance the most remote, that the slightest palliative will be applied

THE IRISH STATE TRIALS.

SPEECH IN THe court of qUEEN'S BENCH, IN IRELAND, IN THE CASE OF THE QUEEN v. DANIEL O'CONNELL, JOHN O'CONNELL, AND OTHERS, IN DEFENCE OF MR. JOHN O'CONNELL.

I AM Counsel for Mr. John O'Connell. The importance of this case is not susceptible of exaggeration, and I do not speak in the language of hyperbole when I say that the attention of the empire is directed to the spot in which we are assembled. How great is the trust reposed in you-how great is the task which I have undertaken to perform? Conscious of its magnitude, I have risen to address you, not anmoved, but undismayed; no-not unmoved-for at this moment how many incidents of my own political life come back upom me, when I look upon my great political benefactor, my deliverer, and my friend; but of the emotion by which I acknowledge myself to be profoundly stirred, although I will not permit myself to be subdued by it, solicitude forms no part. I have great reliance upon you-upon the ascendancy of principle over prejudice in your minds; and I am not entirely without reliance upon myself. I do not speak in the language of vain-glorious self-complacency when I say this. I know that I am surrounded by men infinitely superior to me in every forensic, and in almost every intellectual qualification. My confidence is derived, not from any overweening estimate of my own faculties, but from a thorough conviction of the innocence of my client. I know, and I appear in some sort not only as an advocate but a witness before you. I know him to be innocent of the misdeeds laid to his charge. The same blood flows through their veins-the same feelings circulate through their hearts: the son and the father are in all political regards the same, and with the father I have toiled in no dishonourable companionship for more than half my life in that great work, which it is his chief praise that it was conceived in the spirit of peace-that in the spirit of peace it was carried out—and that in the spirit of peace it was brought by him to its glorious consummation. I am acquainted with every feature of his character, with his thoughts, hopes, fears, aspirations. I haveif I may venture to say--a full cognizance of every pulsation of his heart. I know-I am sure as that I am a living man—that from the sanguinary misdeeds imputed to him, he shrinks with abhorrence. It is this persuasion-profound, impassioned and I trust that it will prove contagious-which will sustain me in the midst of the exhaustion ncidental to this lengthened trial; will enable me to overcome the illness under which I am at this moment labouring; will raise me to the height of this great argument, and lift me to a level with the lofty topics which I shall have occasion to treat in resisting a prosecution, to hich in the anuals of criminal jurisprudence in this country no parallel can be found. Gentlemen, the Attorney-General, in a statement of eleven or twelve hours' duration, read a long series of extracts from speeches and publications, extending over a period of nearly nine months

S

At the termination of every passage which was cited by him, he gave utterance to expressions of strong resentment against the men by whom sentiments so noxious were circulated, in language most envenomed. If, gentlemen of the jury, his anger was not simulated; if his indignation was not merely official; if he spoke as he felt, how does it come to pass that no single step was ever taken by him for the purpose of arresting the progress of an evil represented by him to be so calamitous? He told you that the country was traversed by incendiaries who set fire to the passions of the people; the whole fabric of society, according to the Attorney-General, for the last nine months has been in a blaze; wherefore then did he stand with folded arms to gaze at the conflagration? Where were the Castle fire-engines-where was the indictment -and of ex officio information what had become? Is there not too much reason to think that a project was formed, or rather that a plot was concocted, to decoy the traversers, and that a connivance, amounting almost to sanction, was deliberately adopted as a part of the policy of the government, in order to betray the traversers into indiscretions of which advantage was, in due time to be taken? I have heard it said that it was criminal to tell the people to "bide their time ;"* but is the government to "bide its time," in order to turn popular excitement to account? The public prosecutor who gives an indirect encouragement to agitation, in order that he may afterwards more effectually fall upon it, bears some moral affinity to the informer, who provokes the crime from whose denunciation his ignominious livelihood is derived. Has the Attorney-General adopted a course worthy of his great office— worthy of the ostensible head of the Irish bar, and the representative of its intellect in the House of Commons? Is it befitting that the successor of Saurin, and of Plunket, who should “keep watch and ward" from his high station over the public safety, should descend to the performance of functions worthy only of a commissary of the French police; and in place of being the sentinel, should become the "Artful Dodger” of the state? But what, you may ask, could be the motive of the right honourable gentleman for pursuing the course he has adopted, and for which no explanation has been attempted by him? He could not have obtained any advantage signally serviceable to his party by prosecuting Mr. Duffy or Dr. Gray, for strong articles in their newspapers; or by prosecuting Mr. Steele or Mr. Tierney, for attending unlawful assemblies. He did fish with lines-if I may avail myself of an illustration derived from the habits of my constituents at Dungarvan-but cast a wide and nicely constructed trammel-net, in order that by a kind of miraculous catch he might take the great agitator leviathan himself, a member of parliament -Mr. Steele, three editors of newspapers, and a pair of priests, in one stupendous haul together. But there was another object still more important to be gained. Had the Attorney-General prosecuted individuals for the use of violent language, or for attending unlawful meetings, each individual would have been held responsible for his own acts; but in a prosecution for conspiracy, which is open to every one of the objec

• One of the sɔrs of the Nation is entitled Bide your time."

ons applicable to constructive treason, the acts and the speeches of one nan are given in evidence against another, although the latter may have been at the distance of a hundred miles when the circumstances used against him as evidence, and of which he had no sort of cognizance, took place. By prosecuting Mr. O'Connell for a conspiracy, the AttorneyGeneral treats him exactly as if he were the editor of the Nation, the ditor of the Freeman, and the editor of the Pilot. Indeed, if five or six other editors of newspapers in the country had been joined as traversers, for every line in their newspapers Mr. O'Connell would be held responsible. There is one English gentleman, I believe, upon that jury. If a prosecution for a conspiracy were instituted against the Anti-Corn Law League in England, would he not think it very hard indeed that Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright should be held answerable for every article in the Chronicle, in the Globe, and in the Sun? How large a portion of the case of the crown depends upon this implication of Mr. O'Connell with three Dublin newspapers? He is accused of conspiring with men who certainly never conspired with each other. For those who know anything of newspapers are aware that they are mercantile speculations

the property in them is held by shares-and that the very circumstance of their being engaged in the same politics alienate the proprietors from each other. They pay their addresses to the same mistress, and cordially detest each other. I remember to have heard Mr. Barnes, the celebrated editor of the Times newspaper, once ask Mr. Rogers what manner of man was a Mr. Tomkins? to which Mr. Rogers replied, “he was a dull dog, who read the Morning Herald." Let us turn for a moment from the repeal to the anti-repeal party. You would smile, I think, at the suggestion that Mr. Murray Mansfield* and Mr. Remmy Sheehan should enter into a conspiracy together. Those gentlemen would be themselves astonished at the imputation. Suppose them to be both members of the Conservative Association; would that circumstance be sufficient to sustain, in the judgment of men of plain sense, the charge of conspiracy upon them? Gentlemen, the relation in which Mr. Duffy, Mr. Barrett, and Dr. Gray stood to the Repeal Association, is exactly the same as that in which Mr. Staunton, the proprietor of the Weekly Register, stood towards the Catholic Association. He was paid for his advertisements, and his newspaper contained emancipation news, and was sent to those who desired to receive it. Mr. Staunton is now a member of the Repeal Association; he will tell you that his connexion with that body is precisely of the same character as that which existed with the celebrated body to which I have referred; he will prove to you, that over his paper Mr. O'Connell exercises no sort of control, and tha+ all that is done by him in reference to his paper, is the result of his own ce and unbiassed will. The speeches made at the Association and public meetings were reported by him in the same manner as in the other public journals; he is not a conspirator; the government have not treated him as such. Why? Because there were no poems in his

The proprietor of the Evening Packet.

↑ The proprietor of the Evening Mai Both high Conservatives