SPEECHES FROM THE DOCK, PART I

or, Protests of Irish Patriotism

Speeches Delivered After Conviction,

by

Theobald Wolfe tone
William Orr
the brothers Sheares
Robert Emmet
John Martin (1848)
William Smith O’BRIEN
Thomas Francis Meagher
Terence Bellew McMANUS
John Mitchel
Thomas C. Luby
John O’LEARY
Charles J. Kickham
colonel Thomas F. Burke
captain Mackay

   “Freedom’s battle, once begun,—­
   Bequeath’d from bleeding sire to son,—­
   Though baffled oft, is ever won.”

DUBLIN: 

A. M. Sullivan, Abbey street.

1868

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

Little more than a year ago we commenced an undertaking never previously attempted, yet long called for—­the collection and publication, in a complete form and at a low price, of the Speeches of Irish Patriots, spoken from the dock or the scaffold.

The extraordinary success which attended upon our effort was the best proof that we had correctly appreciated the universal desire of the Irish people to possess themselves of such a memorial of National Protest—­protest unbroken through generations of martyrs.

The work was issued in weekly numbers, and reached a sale previously unheard of in Irish literature.  In a few months the whole issue was exhausted, and for a long time past the demand for a Second Edition has been pressed upon us from all sides.  With that demand we now comply.

The present issue of “Speeches from the Dock” has been carefully revised and considerably improved.  With it, as Part I. of a series, we have bound, as its sequels, Parts II. and III.—­each Part, however, complete in itself—­bringing the list of convict patriot orators down to the latest sentenced in 1868.  It may be that even here the sad array is not to close, and that even yet another sequel may have to be issued, ere the National Protest of which these Voices from the Dock are the utterances, shall be terminated for ever.  Even so, our faith will be all unshaken in the inevitable triumph of the cause for which so many martyrs have thus suffered; and we shall still await in Faith and Hope the first strains of that Hymn of Deliverance which shall yet resound through the valleys of Emancipated Ireland.

90 Middle Abbey street,

November, 1868.

INTRODUCTORY.