ur statesmen sentimentalize upon, and your
journalists denounce far-away tyrannies--the horrors of Neapolitan
dungeons--the abridgement of personal freedom in Continental
countries--the exercise of arbitrary power by irresponsible authority
in other lands--they would turn their eyes homeward, and examine the
treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners. I
would, in all sincerity, suggest that humane and well-meaning men,
who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a
mercy, would rather implore that the doors of solitary and silent
captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an
immediate relief from suffering by immediate execution--the
opportunity of an immediate appeal from man's cruelty to God's
justice. I speak strongly on this point because I feel it deeply. I
speak not without example. At the Commission at which I was tried
there was tried also and sentenced a young man named Stowell. I well
remember that raw and dreary morning, the 12th March, when handcuffed
to Stowell I was sent from Kilmainham Prison to the County Gaol of
Kildare. I well remember our traversing, so handcuffed, from the town
of Sailing to the town of Naas, ancle deep in snow and mud, and I
recall now with pain our sad foreboding of that morning. These in
part have been fulfilled. Sunday after Sunday I saw poor Stowell at
chapel in Naas Gaol drooping and dying. One such Sunday--the 12th
May--passed and I saw him no more. On Wednesday, the 15th, he was, as
they say, _mercifully_ released from prison, but the fiat of mercy
had previously gone forth from a higher power--the political convict
simply reached his own home to die, with loving eyes watching by his
death-bed. On Sunday, the 19th May, he was consigned to another
prison home in Glasnevin Cemetery. May God have mercy on his
soul--may God forgive his persecutors--may God give peace and
patience to those who are doomed to follow.

"Pardon this digression, my lords, I could not avoid it. Returning to
the question, why sentence should not be pronounced upon me, I would
ask your lordships' attention to the fact showing, even in the
estimate of the crown, the case is not one for sentence.

"On the morning of my trial, and before the trial, terms were offered
to me by the crown. The direct proposition was made through my
solicitor, through th