of discharge, for I have gone through seven months of an imprisonment which could not be excelled by demon ingenuity in horror and in hardship—­in solitude, in silence and in suspense.  Your lordships will not only render further litigation necessary by passing sentence for the perhaps high crime—­but still the untried crime—­of refusing to yield obedience to the crown’s proposition for my self-abasement.  You will not, I am sure, visit upon my rejection of Mr. Anderson’s delicate overture—­you will not surely permit the events occurring, unhappily occurring, since my trial to influence your judgments.  And do not, I implore you, accept as a truth, influencing that judgement, Talbot’s definition of the objects of Feminism.  Hear what Devany, the American informer, describes them to be.  ‘The members,’ he says, ’were pledged by word of honour to promote love and harmony amongst all classes of Irishmen and to labour for the independence of Ireland.’  Talbot says that in Ireland ’the members are bound by oath to seize the property of the country and murder all opposed to them.’  Can any two principles be more distinct from each other?  Could there be a conspiracy for a common object by such antagonistic means?  To murder all opposed to your principles may be an effectual way of producing unanimity, but the quality of love and harmony engendered by such a patent process, would be extremely equivocal.  Mr. Talbot, for the purposes of his evidence, must have borrowed a leaf from the History of the French Revolution, and adopted as singularly telling and appropriate for effect the saying attributed to Robespiere:  ’Let us cut everybody’s throat but our own, and then we are sure to be masters.’

“No one in America, I venture to affirm, ever heard of such designs in connexion with the Fenian Brotherhood.  No one in America would countenance such designs.  Revolutionists are not ruffians or rapparees.  A judge from the bench at Cork, and a noble lord in his place in parliament, bore testimony to that fact, in reference to the late movement; and I ask you, my lords—­I would ask the country from this court—­for the sake of the character of your countrymen—­to believe Devany’s interpretation of Fenianism—­tainted traitor though he be—­rather than believe that the kindly instincts of Irishmen, at home and abroad—­their generous impulses—­their tender sensibilities—­all their human affections, in a word—­could degenerate into the attributes of the assassin, as stated by that hog-in-armour, that crime-creating Constable Talbot.

“Taking other ground, my lords, I object to any sentence upon me.  I stand at this bar a declared citizen of the United States of America, entitled to the protection of such citizenship; and I protest against the right to pass any sentence in any British court for acts done, or words spoken, or alleged to be done or spoken, on American soil, within the shades of the American