ask you further to bear in mind that the affirmance of the conviction
was not had on fixed principles of law--for the question was
unprecedented--but on a speculative view of a suppositious case, and
I must say a strained application of an already over-strained and
dangerous doctrine--the doctrine of constructive criminality--the
doctrine of making a man at a distance of three thousand miles or
more, legally responsible for the words and acts of others whom he
had never seen, and of whom he had never heard, under the fiction, or
the 'supposition,' that he was a co-conspirator. The word
'supposition' is not mine, my lords; it is the word put forward
descriptive of the point by the learned judges presiding at my trial;
for I find in the case prepared by these judges for the Court of
Criminal Appeal the following paragraph:--

"'Sufficient evidence was given on the part of the crown of acts of
members of the said association in Ireland not named in the
indictment in promotion of the several objects aforesaid, and done
within the county of the city of Dublin, to sustain some of the overt
acts charged in the indictment supposing them to be the acts of the
defendant himself.'

"Fortified by such facts--with a court so divided, and with opinions
so expressed--I submit that, neither according to act of parliament,
nor in conformity with the practice at common law, nor in any way in
pursuance of the principles of that apocryphal abstraction, that
magnificent myth--the British constitution--am I amenable to the
sentence of this court--or any court in this country. True, I am in
the toils, and it may be vain to discuss how I was brought into them.
True, my long and dreary imprisonment--shut away from all converse or
association with humanity, in a cell twelve feet by six--the
humiliations of prison discipline--the hardships of prison fare--the
handcuffs, and the heartburnings--this court and its surroundings of
power and authority--all these are 'hard practical facts,' which no
amount of indignant protests can negative--no denunciation of the
wrong refine away; and it may be, as I have said, worse than
useless--vain and absurd--to question the right where might is
predominant. But the invitation just extended to me by the officer of
the court means, if it means anything--if it be not like the rest, a
solemn mockery--that