he government confessed or admitted that verdict to be
false--it was not one man, but five men, who were affected by it.
To be sure the reporters' jury, in _their_ verdict, did not include
Allen, O'Brien, Larkin, and Shore; but was it to be conveyed by
implication that omission from the reporters' verdict of acquittal was
more fatal to a man than inclusion in the verdict of guilty by a sworn
jury? Might not twenty, or thirty, or forty men, quite as intelligent
as the reporters, be soon forthcoming to testify as forcibly of Allen,
O'Brien, Larkin, and Shore, as the Press-men had testified of Maguire?
Was it only _reporters_ whose judgment could set aside the verdict of
sworn jurors, endorsed by ermined judges? But, in any event, the five
men were convicted by the one verdict. To cut that, loosed all--not
necessarily in law, perhaps, but inevitably as regarded public
conscience and universal judgment; for there was not in all the
records of English jurisprudence a precedent for executing men on a
verdict acknowledged to have been one of blunder or perjury. Clearly,
if the jurors were to be told by the government that, in a case
where life and death hung on the issue, they had been so blinded
by excitement, passion, or prejudice, that they declared to be a
guilty murderer a man whose innocence was patent even to unofficial
lookers-on in court, the moral value of such a verdict was
gone--ruined for ever; and to hang _anyone_ on such a verdict--_on
that identical verdict, thus blasted and abandoned_--would, it was
pointed out, be murder, for all its technical legality; neither more
nor less, morally, than cool, deliberate, cold-blooded murder.

Everybody saw this; but everyone in England saw also the awkward
difficulty of the case. For, to let Allen, O'Brien, Larkin, and
Shore go free of death, in the face of their admitted complicity in
the rescue, would baulk the national demand for vengeance. It was
necessary that some one should be executed. Here were men who, though
they almost certainly had had no hand in causing, even accidentally,
the death of Brett, dared to boast of their participation in the
affray in the course of which that lamentable event unhappily
occurred--that rescue which had so painfully wounded and humiliated
English national pride. If these men were saved from execution,
owing to any foolish scruples about hanging a possibly--nay,
probably--innocent man along with them, a shout of rage would
ascend fro