Please your worship, had the officials of the crown adopted towards me, in the first instance, the course which they have taken upon the present occasion, and had they not adopted the singular course which they pursued in my regard when I last appeared in this court, I should trouble you with no observations.  For, as one of the 50,000 persons who, on the 8th of December, in this city, publicly, lawfully, and peacefully demonstrated their protest against what they believed to have been a denial of law and an outrage on justice, I should certainly waste no public time in this preliminary investigation, but rather admit the facts as you perceive I have done to-day, and hasten the final decision on the issues really knit between us and the crown.  What was the course adopted by the crown in the first instance against me?  They had before them, on the 9th, just as well as on the 29th—­it is in evidence that they had—­the fact that I, openly and publicly, took part in that demonstration—­that sorrowful and sad protest against injustice (applause).  They had before them then as much as they had before them to-day, or as much as they will ever have affecting me.  For, whatever course I take in public affairs in this country, I conceal nothing, I take it publicly, openly, and deliberately.  If I err, I am satisfied to abide the consequences; and, whenever it may suit the weathercock judgment of Lord Mayo, and his vacillating law advisers, to characterise my acts or my opinion as illegal, seditious, heretical, idolatrous, or treasonable, I must, like every other subject, be content to take my chance of their being able to find a jury sufficiently facile or sufficiently stupid to carry out their behests against me.  But they did not choose that course at first.  They did not summon me as a principal, but they subpoenaed me as a witness—­as a crown witness—­against some of my dearest, personal, and public friends.  The attorney-general, whose word I most fully and frankly accept in the matter—­for I would not charge him with being wanting in personal truthfulness—­denied having had any complicity in the course of conduct pursued towards me; but where does he lay the responsibility?  On “the police.”  What is the meaning of that phrase, “the police?” He surely does not mean that the members of the force, who parade our streets, exercise viceregal functions (laughter).  Who was this person thus called the “police?” How many degrees above or below the attorney-general are we to look for this functionary described as “the police,” who has the authority to have a “seditious” man—­that is the allegation—­a seditious man—­exempted from prosecution?  The police cannot do that.  Who, then?  Who was he that could draw the line between John Martin and his friend A.M.  Sullivan—­exempt the one, prosecute the other—­summon the former as a defendant and subpoena the latter as a crown witness?  What was the object?  It is plain.  There are at this moment, I am