ituting _these retrospective prosecutions_. For this mistake
the law officers of the crown must, we infer, be held responsible.
Were they men of energy and vigour, with the necessary knowledge of
the world, they would not have suffered the executive to permit
processions first, and then prohibit them, and at the same time try
men for participating in what had been pronounced not to be illegal.
We exonerate the attorney-general from the error of summoning to give
evidence persons who openly gloried in the part they had taken in
these meetings. To command the presence of such witnesses was of the
nature of an offence. There was no ground, for instance, for
supposing that Mr. Sullivan would have played the informer against
the friends who had walked with him in the procession--such is not
his character, his feeling, or his sense of honour. The summoning of
those who had moved with, and as part of, the multitude, to give
evidence against their fellows, was not only a most injudicious, but
a futile expedient, and naturally has caused very great
dissatisfaction and annoyance. The circumstance, however, proves that
the prosecutions was instituted without that exact care and minute
attention to all particulars which are necessary in a case of this
kind.

Even the _Daily Express_, the, all-but subsidised, if not the secretly
subsidised, organ of the ultra-orange section of the Irish
administration, had to own the discomfiture of its patrons:--

Are our police offices to become a kind of national journals court?
Is the "national press of Ireland" then and there to bid for the
support immediately of the gallery, and more remotely of that portion
of the population which is humourously called the Irish Nation? These
speculations are suggested by a curious scene which took place at the
inquiry at the police office yesterday, and which will be found
detailed in another column. Mr. Sullivan, the editor of the _Nation_,
seized the opportunity of being summoned as a witness, to denounce
the government for not including him in the prosecution. He
complained "of endeavouring to place the editor of a national journal
on the list of crown witnesses in this court as a public and
personal indignity," and as an endeavour to destroy the influence of
the national press. It is certainly an open avowal to declare that
the mere placing of the name of