“Pardon this digression, my lords, I could not avoid it.  Returning to the question, why sentence should not be pronounced upon me, I would ask your lordships’ attention to the fact showing, even in the estimate of the crown, the case is not one for sentence.

“On the morning of my trial, and before the trial, terms were offered to me by the crown.  The direct proposition was made through my solicitor, through the learned counsel who so ably defended me, through the Governor of Kilmainham Prison—­by all three—­that if I pleaded guilty to the indictment, I should get off with six months’ imprisonment.  Knowing the pliancy of Dublin juries in political cases, the offer was, doubtless, a tempting one.  Valuing liberty, it was almost resistless—­in view of a possible penal servitude—­but having regard to principle, I spurned the compromise.  I then gave unhesitatingly, as I would now give, the answer, that not for a reduction of the punishment to six hours would I surrender faith—­that I need never look, and could never look, wife or children, friends or family, in the face if capable of such a selfish cowardice.  I could not to save myself imperil the safety of others—­I could not plead guilty to an indictment in which six others were distinctly charged by name as co-conspirators with me—­one of those six since tried, convicted, and sentenced to death—­I could not consent to obtain my own pardon at their expense—­furnish the crown with a case in point for future convictions, and become, even though indirectly, worthy to rank with that brazen battalion of venal vagabonds, who have made the Holy Gospel of God the medium of barter for their unholy gain, and obtained access to the inmost heart of their selected victim only to coin its throbbing into the traitor’s gold and traffic on its very life-blood.

“Had I been charged simply with my own words and deeds I would have no hesitation in making acknowledgement.  I have nothing to repent and nothing to conceal—­nothing to retract and nothing to countermand; but in the language of the learned Lord Chief Baron in this case, I could not admit ’the preposterous idea of thinking by deputy’ any more than I could plead guilty to an indictment which charge others with crime.  Further, my lords, I could not acknowledge culpability for the acts and words of others at a distance of three thousand miles—­others whom I had never seen, of whom I had never heard, and with whom I never had had communication.  I could not admit that the demoniac atrocities, described as Fenian principles by the constabulary-spy Talbot, ever had my sanction or approval or the sanction or approval of any man in America.

“If, my lords, six months’ imprisonment was the admeasurement of the law officers of the crown as an adequate punishment for my alleged offence—­assuming that the court had jurisdiction to try and punish—­then, am I now entitled to my discharge independent of all other grounds