you to sit in that box.  If you do not fairly represent the community, and if you are not empanelled indifferently in that sense, you are no jury in the spirit of the constitution.  I care not how the crown practice may be within the technical letter of the law, it violates the intent and meaning of the constitution, and it is not “trial by jury.”  Let us suppose the scene removed, say, to France.  A hundred names are returned on what is called a panel by a state functionary for the trial of a journalist charged with sedition.  The accused is powerless to remove any name from the list unless for over-age or non-residence.  But the imperial prosecutor has the arbitrary power of ordering as many as he pleases to “stand aside.”  By this means he puts or allows on the jury only whomsoever he pleases.  He can, beforehand, select the twelve, and, by wiping out, if it suits him, the eighty-eight other names, put the twelve of his own choosing into the box.  Can this be called trial by jury?  Would not it be the same thing, in a more straightforward way, to let the crown-solicitor send out a policeman and collect twelve well-accredited persons of his own mind and opinion?  For my own part, I would prefer this plain-dealing, and consider far preferable the more rude but honest hostility of a drum-head court martial (applause in the court).  Again I say, understand me well, I am objecting to the principle, the system, the practice, and not to the twelve gentlemen now before me as individuals.  Personally, I am confident that being citizens of Dublin, whatever your views or opinions, you are honourable and conscientious men.  You may have strong prejudices against me or my principles in public life—­very likely you have; but I doubt not that though these may unconsciously tinge your judgment and influence your verdict, you will not consciously violate the obligations of your oath.  And I care not whether the crown, in permitting you to be the twelve, ordered three, or thirteen, or thirty others to “stand by”—­or whether those thus arbitrarily put aside were Catholics or Protestants, Liberals, Conservatives, or Nationalists—­the moment the crown put its finger at all on the panel, in a case where the accused had no equal right, the essential character of the jury was changed, and the spirit of the constitution was outraged.  And now, what is the charge against my fellow-traversers and myself?  The solicitor-general put it very pithily awhile ago when he said our crime was “glorifying the cause of murder.”  The story of the crown is a very terrible, a very startling one.  It alleges a state of things which could hardly be supposed to exist amongst the Thugs of India.  It depicts a population so hideously depraved that thirty thousand of them in one place, and tens of thousands in various other places, arrayed themselves publicly in procession to honour and glorify murder—­to sympathise with murderers as murderers.  Yes, gentlemen, that is the crown case, or they have