and liberty may be united, how the state may have both order and contentment.  The application of the knowledge which he has gained—­viz., the study of law to the daily facts of human society—­sharpens and strengthens all his faculties, clears his judgment, helps him to distinguish true from false, and right from wrong.  It is no wonder, gentlemen, that an accomplished and virtuous lawyer holds a high place in the aristocracy of merit in every free country.  Like all things human, the legal profession has its dark as well as its bright side, has in it germs of decay and rotten foulness as well as of health and beauty; but yet it is a noble profession, and one which I admire and respect.  But, above all, I would desire to respect the bar of my own country, and the Irish bar—­the bar made illustrious by such memories as those of Grattan and Flood, and the Emmets, and Curran, and Plunket, and Saurin, and Holmes, and Sheil, and O’Connell.  I may add, too, of Burke and of Sheridan, for they were Irish in all that made them great.  The bar of Ireland wants this day only the ennobling inspirations of national freedom to raise it to a level with the world.  Under the Union very few lawyers have been produced whose names can rank in history with any of the great names I have mentioned.  But still, even the present times of decay, and when the Union is preparing to carry away our superior courts, and the remains of our bar to Westminster, and to turn that beautiful building upon the quay into a barrack like the Linen Hall, or an English tax-gatherer’s office like the Custom House, there are many learned, accomplished, and respectable lawyers at the Irish bar, and far be it from me to doubt but that any Irish lawyer who might undertake my defence would loyally exert himself as the lofty idea of professional honour commands to save me from a conviction.  But to this attack upon my character as a good citizen and upon my liberty, my lords and gentlemen, the only defence I could permit to be offered would be a full justification of my political conduct, morally, constitutionally, legally—­a complete vindication of my acts and words alleged to be seditious and disloyal, and to retort against my accusers the charge of sedition and disloyalty.  Not, indeed, that I would desire to prosecute these gentlemen upon that charge, if I could count upon convicting them and send them to the dungeon instead of myself.  I don’t desire to silence them, or to hurt a hair of their wigs because their political opinions differed from mine.  Gentlemen, this prosecution against me, like the prosecutions just accomplished against two national newspapers, is part of a scheme of the ministers of the crown for suppressing all voice of protest against the Union, for suppressing all public complaint against the deadly results of the Union, and all advocacy by act, speech, or writing for Repeal of the Union.  Now I am a Repealer so long as I have been a politician at all—­that is for at least twenty-four years past.  Until