adequate punishment for my alleged
offence--assuming that the court had jurisdiction to try and
punish--then, am I now entitled to my discharge independent of all
other grounds of discharge, for I have gone through seven months of
an imprisonment which could not be excelled by demon ingenuity in
horror and in hardship--in solitude, in silence and in suspense. Your
lordships will not only render further litigation necessary by
passing sentence for the perhaps high crime--but still the untried
crime--of refusing to yield obedience to the crown's proposition for
my self-abasement. You will not, I am sure, visit upon my rejection
of Mr. Anderson's delicate overture--you will not surely permit the
events occurring, unhappily occurring, since my trial to influence
your judgments. And do not, I implore you, accept as a truth,
influencing that judgement, Talbot's definition of the objects of
Feminism. Hear what Devany, the American informer, describes them to
be. 'The members,' he says, 'were _pledged by word of honour_ to
promote love and harmony amongst all classes of Irishmen and to
labour for the independence of Ireland.' Talbot says that in Ireland
'the members are _bound by oath_ to seize the property of the
country and murder all opposed to them.' Can any two principles be
more distinct from each other? Could there be a conspiracy for a
common object by such antagonistic means? To murder all opposed to
your principles may be an effectual way of producing unanimity, but
the quality of love and harmony engendered by such a patent process,
would be extremely equivocal. Mr. Talbot, for the purposes of his
evidence, must have borrowed a leaf from the History of the French
Revolution, and adopted as singularly telling and appropriate for
effect the saying attributed to Robespiere: 'Let us cut everybody's
throat but our own, and then we are sure to be masters.'

"No one in America, I venture to affirm, ever heard of such designs
in connexion with the Fenian Brotherhood. No one in America would
countenance such designs. Revolutionists are not ruffians or
rapparees. A judge from the bench at Cork, and a noble lord in his
place in parliament, bore testimony to that fact, in reference to the
late movement; and I ask you, my lords--I would ask the country from
this court--for the sake of the character of your countrymen--to
be