won without the effusion of blood-that he would drench the land of his birth, of his affections, and of his redemption, in a deluge of profitless massacre, and that he would lay prostrate that great moral monument which he has raised so high that it is visible from the remotest region of the world? What he was in 1798 he is in 1844. Do you believe that the man who aimed at a revolution would repudiate French assistance, and denounce the present dynasty of France? Do you think that the man who aimed at revolution, would hold forth to the detestation of the world, the infamous slavery by which the great trans-Atlantic republic, to her everlasting shame, permits herself to be degraded? Or, to come nearer home, do you think that the man who aimed at revolution, would have indignantly repudiated the proffered junction with he English Chartists? Had a combination been effected between the Chartists and the Repealers it would have been more than formidable. At the head of that combination in England was Mr. Feargus O'Connor, once the associate and friend of Daniel O'Connell. The entire of the lower orders in the North of England were enrolled in a powerful organization. A league between the Repealers and the Chartists might have been at once effected. Chartism uses its utmost and most clandestine efforts to find its way into this country. O'Connell detects and crushes it. Of the charges preferred against him, am I not right when I exclaim that his life contains the refutation? To the charge that Mr. O'Connell and his son conspired to excite animosity amongst her Majesty's subjects, the last observation that I have made to you is more peculiarly applicable. Gentlemen, Mr. O'Connell and his co-religionists have been made the objects of the fiercest and the coarsest vituperation; and yet I defy the most acute and diligent scrutiny of the entire of the speeches put before you, to detect a single expression--one solitary phrase-which reflects in the remotest degree upon the Protestant religion. He has left all the contumely heaped upon the form of Christianity which he professes utterly unheeded, and the Protestant OperaJive Society has not provoked a retort; and every angry disputant has without any interposition on his part, been permitted to rush in " where angels fear to tread." The religion of Mr. O'Connell teaches him two things-charity towards those who dissent from him in doctrine, and forgiveness of those who do him wrong. You recollect (it is from such incidents that we are enabled to judge of the characters and feelings of men) you remember to have heard in the course of the evidence frequent reference made to Sir Bradley King. The unfortunate man had been deprived of his office, and all compensation was denied him. He used to stand in the lobby of the House of Commons, the most desolate and hopeless looking man I ever saw. The only one of his old friends that stuck to him was Baron Lefroy. But Baron Lefroy had no interest with the government. Mr. O'Connell saw Bradley King, and took pity on him. Bradley King had been his fierce political, almost his personal antagonist. Mr. O'Connell went to Lord Althorpe, and obtained for Bradley King the compensation which had been refused him. I remem、 bered having read a most striking letter addressed by Sir Abraham Bradley King to Mr. O'Connell, and asked him for it. He could not at

first put his hand upon it; but, while looking for it, he mentioned that soon after the death of the old Dublin alderman, an officer entered his study, and told him that he was the son-in-law of Sir Abraham, who had, a short time before his death, called him to his bedside and said "When I shall have been buried, go to Daniel O'Connell, and tell him that the last prayer of a grateful man was offered up for him, and that I implored heaven to avert every peril from his head." Mr. O’Conell found the letter-you will allow me to read it :—

“Barrett's Hotel, Spring Gardens, 4th Aug. 1832. “My dear Sir—The anxious wish for a satisfactory termination of my cause, which your continued and unwearied efforts for it have ever indicated, is at length accomplished; the vote of compensation passed last night.

"To Mr. Lefroy and yourself am I indebted for putting the case in the right light to my Lord Althorpe, and for his lordship's consequent candid and straightforward act, in giving me my just dues, and thus restoring myself and family to competence, ease, and happiness.

"To you, Sir, to whom I was early and long politically opposed-to you, who nobly forgetting this continued difference of opinion, and who, rejecting every idea of party feeling or party spirit, thought only of my distress, and sped to succour and support me, how can I express my gratitude? I cannot attempt it. The reward, I feel, is to be found only in your own breast, and I assure myself that the generous feelings of a noble mind will cheer you on to that prosperity and happiness which a discriminating Providence holds out to those who protect the helpless, and sustain the falling.

"For such reward and happiness to you and yours my prayers shall be offered fervently, while the remainder of my days, passing, I trust, in tranquillity, by a complete retirement from public life, and in the bosom of my family, will constantly present to me the grateful recollection of one to whom I am mainly indebted for so desirable a closing of my life. Believe me, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect and truth, your faithful servant,

"To Daniel O'Connell, Esq., M.P."

"ABRAHAM BRADLEY KING.

You may deprive him of liberty-you may shut him out from the face of nature, you may inter him in a dungeon, to which a ray of the sun never yet descended; but you never will take away from him the consciousness of having done a good and a noble action, and of being entitled to kneel down every night he sleeps, and to address to his Creator the divinest portion of our Redeemer's prayer. The man to whom that letter was addressed, and the son of the man to whom that letter was addressed, are not guilty of the sanguinary intents which have been ascribed to them, and of this they "put themselves upo their country." Rescue that phrase from its technicalities-let it ne longer be a fictitious one; if we have lost our representation in the parliament, let us behold it in the jury box, and that you participate in the feelings of millions of your countrymen let your verdict afford

But

a proof. But it is not to Ireland that the aching solicitude with which the result of this trial is intently watched will be confined. There is not a great city in Europe in which, upon the day when the great intelligence shall be expected to arrive, men will not stop each other in the public way, and inquire whether twelve men upon their oaths have doomed to incarceration the man who gave liberty to Ireland? Whatever may be your adjudication he is prepared to meet it. He knows that the eyes of the world are upon him-and that posterity—whether in a gaol or out of it-will look back to him with admiration; he is almost indifferent to what may befal him, and is far more solicitous for others at this moment than for himself. But I-at the commencement of what I have said to you-I told you that I was not unmoved, and that many incidents of my political life, the strange alternations of fortune through which I have passed, had come back upon me. now the bare possibility at which I have glanced, has, I acknowledge, almost unmanned me. Shall I, who stretch out to you in behalf of the son the hand whose fetters the father has struck off, live to cast my eyes upon that domicile of sorrow, in the vicinity of this great metropolis, and say, ""Tis there they have immured the Liberator of Ireland with his fondest and best beloved child?" No! it shall never be! You will not consign him to the spot to which the AttorneyGeneral invites you to surrender him. When the Spring shall have come again, and the winter shall have passed-when the spring shall have come again, it is not through the windows of a prison-house that the father of such a son, and the son of such a father, shall look upon chose green hills on which the eyes of many a captive have gazed so wistfully in vain, but in their own mountain home again they shall listen to the murmurs of the great Atlantic; they shall go forth and inhale the freshness of the morning air together; "they shall be free of mountain solitudes;" they will be encompassed with the loftiest images of liberty upon every side; and if time shall have stolen its suppleness from the father's knee, or impaired the firmness of his tread, he shall lean on the child of her that watches over him from heaven, and shall look out from some high place far and wide into the island whose greatness and whose glory shall be for ever associated with his name. In your love of justice-in your love of Ireland-in your love of honesty and fair play I place my confidence. I ask you for an acquittal, not only for the sake of your country, but for your own. Upon the day when this trial shall have been brought to a termination, when, amidst he hush of public expectancy, in answer to the solemn interrogatory which shall be put to you by the officer of the court, you shall answer, "Not guilty," with what a transport will that glorious negative be welcomed! How will you be blessed, adored, worshipped; and when retiring from this scene of excitement and of passion, you shall return to your own tranquil homes, how pleasurably will you look upon your children, in the consciousness that you will have left them a patrimony of peace by impressing upon the British cabinet, that some other measure besides a state prosecution is necessary for the pacification of your country!

THE IRISH STATE TRIALS.

SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, FEBRUARY 22, 1844.

I Do not rise last night at the conclusion of the speech of the Attorney-General for Ireland, for two reasons. The first was, that that speech did not terminate until nearly twelve, and I despaired of engaging the attention of the house at so late an hour; in the next place, I was anxious that the right honourable and learned gentleman should afford me an opportunity of looking at the report of the case in which I was engaged fifteen years ago, to which he has thought it judicious to advert. I wished to look at that report for the purpose of vindicating myself from what I regard as a very serious charge. I applied to the right honourable gentleman for the report, and he had the goodness at once to give it to me. This house must have been under the impression that I packed a jury, and that it was exclusively Roman Catholic. The house must have thought, that I exercised the prerogative vested in me by the crown, with the sanction of the law officers, for the purpose of placing in the jury-box twelve men, my own co-religionists, and the co-religionists of the person for whose death the prosecution was instituted. The right honourable gentleman said that he was present on that occasion; I think he will admit the truth of my assertion, that of my conduct in the course of that prosecution the attorney and counsel for the prisoner did not complain, and the regular counsel for the crown did not intimate that any fault was to be found with my conduct. In order to obtain a mixed jury, I was under the necessity, as the prisoner challenged every Catholic, to set aside Protestants, until I could obtain the religious combination which I desired to effect. It may be said that I gave the Catholics a majority of one on the jury; but when you recollect that unanimity was required for a conviction, you will at once perceive that a preponderance of one was of no consequence. If the Irish Attorney-General had followed my example in the state prosecutions, and out of the common panel had allowed five Catholics to remain on the jury, we should not have impeached his verdict. The Attorney-General has brought against me a very serious charge-he said that where a man was on his trial for his life, I acted a most cenurable part. His book refutes him. I find in it a report of my speech; and in order to prove that I did not hunt down the defendant with a bloodhound sagacity, I hope I shall be forgiven if I read one or two passages, which will show the house the spirit in which the prosecution was conducted. I hope the house will listen to this self-vindication, if not with interest at least with indulgence; and I must say, that I never saw an occasion on which that feeling of the House of Commons was more strongly manifested than it had been last night, in listening to a speech of the right honourable and learned gentleman, distinguished for ability, and, let me add, for moral courage. The following is the commencement of the speech made by me in the case to which the Attorney-General reters :-

I

"I am counsel in a case which the gentlemen to whom the AttorneyGeneral habitually confides the enforcement of the law have permitted me, at the instance of the persons interested in the prosecution, to conduct. I trust that I shall not abuse the licence which has been afforded me. I feel that I am invested with a triple trust. The first is that which I owe my client, for whom I do not ask for vengeance, but for that retribution for which the instincts of nature make in the bosom of a parent their strong and almost sacred call. My client is the mother of the boy for whose death the prisoner at the bar stands arraigned. J owe the next duty to Mr. Pearse himself. If I am asked in what particular I am bound to him, I answer that I cannot avoid entertaining for him that sentiment of commiseration which every well-minded man will extend to one who may be really innocent of a crime, the imputation of which is itself a misfortune; and I do assure you (he will permit me, hope, to extend the assurance to himself), that it is with melancholy that I raise my eyes and see him occupying the place where guilt and misery are accustomed to stand. To him I owe it as an obligation that I should not abuse the advantage of delivering a statement to which his counsel cannot reply. The scriptural injunction inscribed above that seat of Justice, admonishes me that I ought not to make any appeal to your passions against a man whose mouth is closed, and to whose counsel the right of speaking, by an equally cruel and fantastic anomaly, is refused by the law. "Aperi os tuum, muto" is written there in golden characters, not only to suggest to your lordship the duty of a judicial interposition on behalf of the silent, but also to warn the advocate not to avail himself in any merciless spirit of his forensic prerogative against the man whom the law has stricken dumb. I shall make it superfluous on the part of his counsel to produce evidence in favour of his character he is a man of worth and honour, and until the fatal event for which he stands indicted, has borne a reputation for peculiar kindness of heart."

After stating the facts I concluded thus:

"At the outset of my statement I expressed myself in praise of the defendant, and, as I advance to a conclusion, I pause for an instant to reiterate my panegyric. He has been, I repeat it, up to the time of this incident, a humane and well-conducted man. Let him have the full benefit of this commendation. If it shall appear that under circumstances which constituted a necessity, and in obedience to the instinct of selfpreservation he exclaimed 'fire!' then I am the very first to call on you to acquit him."

This is not the language of a man actuated by the fierce zeal of a relentless prosecutor; I think it far less vehement than the charges of judges which we occasionally hear in Ireland. At the conclusion of the evidence, I told the judge that I thought that no case for charging the defendant with murder had been made out. I do think that the Attorney-General, in reverting to a trial which took place fifteen years ago, has not acted with ingenuousness, and I am convinced that in the opinion of the house I have freed myself from the imputation that I did not exercise the prerogative of the crown with the intent attributed to