ment in respect of
them? We unhesitatingly deny it. The merest tyro can see that it is
_possible_--and, if so, where is the NECESSARY error?--that the judges
excluded the vicious counts from their consideration; that they knew the
law, and could discern what were and what were not "offences;" and
annexed punishment to only true "_offences_" in the eye of the law. The
word "offence" is a term of art, and is here used in its strictest
technical sense. What is that sense? It is thus defined by an accurate
writer on law: "an _offence_ is an act committed _against a law_, or
omitted _when the law requires it_, and punishable by it."[25] This word
is, then, properly used in the record--in its purely technical sense. It
can have no other meaning; and an indictment cannot, with great
deference to Mr Baron Parke,[26] contain an "offence" which is not
"legally described in it;" that is, unless any act charged against the
defendant be shown upon the face of the indictment to be a breach of the
law, no "_offence_," as regards that act, is contained in or alleged by
the indictment. The House of Lords, therefore, has exceeded the narrow
province and limited authority of a _court of error_, or has presumed,
upon illegal and insufficient grounds, that the Irish judges did not
know which were, and which were not "_offences_," and that they did, in
fact, consider those to be offences which were not, although the record
contains matter to satisfy the allegation to the letter--viz. a
_plurality_ of real "offences." Where is Lord Campbell's authority for
declaring this judgment "_clearly_ erroneous in awarding punishment for
charges which are _not offences in point of law_?" Or Lord Cottenham's,
for saying that "the record states that the judgment was _upon all the
counts, bad as well as good_?" They have none whatever; their assertions
appear to us, with all due deference and respect, purely arbitrary, and
gratuitous fallacies; they do violence to legal language--to the
language of the record, and foist upon it a ridiculous and false
interpretation. We admit, with Lord Cottenham, that "where the sentence
is of a nature applicable _only_ to the bad counts," it is incurably
vicious, and judgment must be reversed--it is the very case which we put
above; but how does that appear in the judgment under consideration? Not
at all. The two cases are totally different.

And this brings us to another palpable fallacy--another glaring and
serious erro