existing authority that a distinguished informer of antiquity seized with remorse, threw away his blood-money, ’went forth and hanged himself.’  We know that in times within the memory of living men a government actually set the edifying and praiseworthy example of hanging an informer when they had no further use of his valuable services—­thus dropping his acquaintance with effect.  I have no wish for such a fate to any of the informers who have cropped out so luxuriantly in these latter days—­a long life and a troubled conscience would, perhaps, be their correct punishment—­though certainly there would be a consistent compensation—­a poetic justice—­in a termination so exalted to a career so brilliant.

“I leave these fellows and turn for a moment to their victims.  And, I would here, without any reference to my own case, earnestly implore that sympathy with political sufferers should not be merely telescopic in its character, ’distance lending enchantment to the view;’ and that when your statesmen sentimentalize upon, and your journalists denounce far-away tyrannies—­the horrors of Neapolitan dungeons—­the abridgement of personal freedom in Continental countries—­the exercise of arbitrary power by irresponsible authority in other lands—­they would turn their eyes homeward, and examine the treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners.  I would, in all sincerity, suggest that humane and well-meaning men, who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a mercy, would rather implore that the doors of solitary and silent captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an immediate relief from suffering by immediate execution—­the opportunity of an immediate appeal from man’s cruelty to God’s justice.  I speak strongly on this point because I feel it deeply.  I speak not without example.  At the Commission at which I was tried there was tried also and sentenced a young man named Stowell.  I well remember that raw and dreary morning, the 12th March, when handcuffed to Stowell I was sent from Kilmainham Prison to the County Gaol of Kildare.  I well remember our traversing, so handcuffed, from the town of Sailing to the town of Naas, ancle deep in snow and mud, and I recall now with pain our sad foreboding of that morning.  These in part have been fulfilled.  Sunday after Sunday I saw poor Stowell at chapel in Naas Gaol drooping and dying.  One such Sunday—­the 12th May—­passed and I saw him no more.  On Wednesday, the 15th, he was, as they say, mercifully released from prison, but the fiat of mercy had previously gone forth from a higher power—­the political convict simply reached his own home to die, with loving eyes watching by his death-bed.  On Sunday, the 19th May, he was consigned to another prison home in Glasnevin Cemetery.  May God have mercy on his soul—­may God forgive his persecutors—­may God give peace and patience to those who are doomed to follow.