no case at all—­that the funeral procession in Dublin on the 8th December last was a demonstration of sympathy with murder as murder.  For you will have noted that never once in his smart narration of the crown story, did Mr. Harrison allow even the faintest glimmer to appear of any other possible complexion or construction of our conduct.  Why, I could have imagined it easy for him not merely to state his own case, but to state ours too, and show where we failed, and where his own side prevailed.  I could easily imagine Mr. Harrison stating our view of the matter—­and combatting it.  But he never once dared to even mention our case.  His whole aim was to hide it from you, and to fasten, as best such efforts of his could fasten, in your minds this one miserable refrain—­“They glorified the cause of murder and assassination.”  But this is no new trick.  It is the old story of the maligners of our people.  They call the Irish a turbulent, riotous, crime-loving, law-hating race.  They are for ever pointing to the unhappy fact—­for, gentlemen, it is a fact—­that between the Irish people and the laws under which they now live there is little or no sympathy, but bitter estrangement and hostility of feeling or of action.  Bear with me if I examine this charge, since an understanding of it is necessary in order to judge our conduct on the 8th December last.  I am driven upon this extent of defence by the singular conduct of the solicitor-general, who, with a temerity which he will repent, actually opened the page of Irish history, going back upon it just so far as it served his own purpose, and no farther.  Ah! fatal hour for my prosecutors when they appealed to history.  For assuredly, that is the tribunal that will vindicate the Irish people, and confound those who malign them as sympathisers with assassination and glorifiers of murder—­

   Solicitor-General—­My lord, I must really call upon you—­I deny that
   I ever—­

   Mr. Justice Fitzgerald—­Proceed, Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan—­My lord, I took down the solicitor-general’s words.  I quote them accurately as he spoke them, and he cannot get rid of them now.  “Glorifiers of the cause of murder” was his designation of my fellow-traversers and myself, and our fifty thousand fellow-mourners in the funeral procession; and before I sit down I will make him rue the utterance.  Gentlemen of the jury, if British law be held in “disesteem”—­as the crown prosecutors phrase it—­here in Ireland, there is an explanation for that fact, other than that supplied by the solicitor-general; namely, the wickedness of seditious persons like myself, and the criminal sympathies of a people ever ready to “glorify the cause of murder.”  Mournful, most mournful, is the lot of that land where the laws are not respected—­nay, revered by the people.  No greater curse could befall a country than to have the laws estranged from popular esteem, or in antagonism with the national