in accordance with my own feelings, I avoid everything like speech-making for outside effect.  Besides, the learned counsel who so ably represented me in the Court of Appeal, and the eminent judges who in that court gave judgment for me, have exhausted all that could be said on the law of the case.  Of their arguments and opinions your lordships have judicial knowledge.  I need not say that both in interest as in conviction I am in agreement with the constitutional principles laid down by the minority of the judges in that court, and I have sufficient respect for the dignity of the court—­sufficient regard to what is due to myself—­to concede fully and frankly to the majority a conscientious view of a novel and, it may be, a difficult question.

“But I do not ask too much in asking that before your lordships proceed to pass any sentence you will consider the manner in which the court was divided on that question—­to bear in mind that the minority declaring against the legality and the validity of the conviction was composed of some of the ablest and most experienced judges of the Irish bench or any bench—­to bear in mind that one of these learned judges who had presided at the Commission Court was one of the most emphatic in the Court of Criminal Appeal in declaring against my liability to be tried; and moreover—­and he ought to know—­that there was not a particle of evidence to sustain the cause set up at the last moment, and relied upon by the crown, that I was an ‘accessory before the fact’ to that famous Dublin overt act, for which, as an afterthought of the crown, I was in fact tried.  And I ask you further to bear in mind that the affirmance of the conviction was not had on fixed principles of law—­for the question was unprecedented—­but on a speculative view of a suppositious case, and I must say a strained application of an already over-strained and dangerous doctrine—­the doctrine of constructive criminality—­the doctrine of making a man at a distance of three thousand miles or more, legally responsible for the words and acts of others whom he had never seen, and of whom he had never heard, under the fiction, or the ‘supposition,’ that he was a co-conspirator.  The word ‘supposition’ is not mine, my lords; it is the word put forward descriptive of the point by the learned judges presiding at my trial; for I find in the case prepared by these judges for the Court of Criminal Appeal the following paragraph:—­

“’Sufficient evidence was given on the part of the crown of acts of members of the said association in Ireland not named in the indictment in promotion of the several objects aforesaid, and done within the county of the city of Dublin, to sustain some of the overt acts charged in the indictment supposing them to be the acts of the defendant himself.’

“Fortified by such facts—­with a court so divided, and with opinions so expressed—­I submit that, neither according to act of parliament,