convinced—­who doubts it?—­throughout Ireland, as yet unfound out, Talbots and Corridons in the pay of the crown acting as Fenian centres, who, next day, would receive from their employers directions to spread amongst my countrymen the intelligence that I had been here to betray my associate, John Martin (applause).  But their plot recoiled—­their device was exposed; public opinion expressed its reprobation of the unsuccessful trick; and now they come to mend their hand.  The men who were exempted before are prosecuted to-day.  Now, your worships, on this whole case—­on this entire procedure—­I deliberately charge that not we, but the government, have violated the law.  I charge that the government are well aware that the law is against them—­that they are irresistibly driven upon this attempt to strain and break the law against the constitutional right and liberty of the subject by their mere party exigencies and necessities.

He then reviewed at length the bearing of the Party Processions Act upon the present case; and next proceeded to deal with the subject of the Manchester executions; maintaining that the men were hanged, as were others before them, in like moments of national passion and frenzy, on a false evidence and a rotten verdict.  Mr. Sullivan proceeded:—­

It is because the people love justice and abhor injustice—­because the real crime of those three victims is believed to have been devotion to native land—­that the Catholic churches of Ireland resound with prayers and requiem hymns, and the public highways were lined with sympathising thousands, until the guilty fears of the executioners proclaimed it illegal to mourn.  Think you, sir, if the crown view of this matter were the true one, would the Catholic clergy of Ireland—­they who braved fierce and bitter unpopularity in reprehending the Fenian conspiracy at a time when Lord Mayo’s organ was patting it on the back for its ’fine Sardinian spirit’—­would these ministers of religion drape their churches for three common murderers?  I repel as a calumnious and slanderous accusation against the Catholic clergy of Ireland this charge, that by their mourning for those three martyred Irishmen, they expressed sympathy, directly or indirectly, with murder or life-taking.  If an act be seditious, it is not the less illegal in the church than in the graveyard, or on the road to the cemetery.  Are we, then, to understand that our churches are to be invaded by bands of soldiery, and our priests dragged from the altars, for the seditious crime of proclaiming aloud their belief in the innocence of Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien?  This, sir, is what depends on the decision in this case, here or elsewhere.  All this and more.  It is to be decided whether, in their capacity of Privy Councillors, the judges of the land shall put forth a proclamation the legality or binding force of which they will afterwards sit as judges to try.  It is whether, there being no constitution now allowed to exist in the country,