from the courses into which the government conduct has been driving them, and I say that there is no more revolutionary agent in the land than that persecution of authority which says to the people, “When we strike you, we forbid you to weep.”  We meet the crown, foot to foot, on its case here.  We say we have committed no offence, but that the prosecution against us has been instituted to subserve their party exigencies, and that the government is straining and violating the law.  We challenge them to the issue, and even should they succeed in obtaining from a crown jury a verdict against us, we have a wider tribunal to appeal to—­the decision of our own consciences and the judgment of humanity (applause).

   Mr. Murphy, Q.C., briefly replied.  He asked his worship not to decide
   that the procession was illegal, but that this case was one for a
   court of law and a jury.

On this occasion it was unnecessary for Mr. Dix to take any “time to consider his decision.”  All the accused were bound over in their own recognizances to stand their trials at the forthcoming Commission in Green-street court, on the 10th of February, 1868.

The plunge which the crown officials had shivered so long before attempting had now been taken, and they determined to go through with the work, a l’outrance.  In the interval between the last police-court scene described above, and the opening of the Green-street Commission, in February, 1868, prosecutions were directly commenced against the Irishman and the Weekly News for seditious writing.  In the case of the former journal the proprietor tried some skilfully-devised preparatory legal moves and manoeuvers, not one of which of course succeeded, though their justice and legality were apparent enough.  In the case of the latter journal—­the Weekly News—­the proprietor raised no legal point whatsoever.  The fact was that when he found the crown not content with one state prosecution against him (that for the funeral procession), coming upon him with a second, he knew his doom was sealed.  He very correctly judged that legal moves would be all in vain—­that his conviction, per fas aut ne fas, was to be obtained—­that a jury would be packed against him—­and that consequently the briefest and most dignified course for him would be to go straight to the conflict and meet it boldly.

On Monday, 10th February, 1868, the commission was opened in Green-street, Dublin, before Mr. Justice Fitzgerald and Baron Deasy.  Soon a cunning and unworthy legal trick on the part of the crown was revealed.  The prosecuted processionists and journalists had been indicted in the city venue, had been returned for trial to the city commission by a city jury.  But the government at the last moment mistrusted a city jury in this instance—­even a packed city jury—­and without any notice to the traversers, sent the indictments before