flag, and under the sanction of American institutions.  I protest against the assumption that would in this country limit the right of thought, or control the liberty of speech in an assemblage of American citizens in an American city.  The United States will, doubtless, respect and protect her neutrality laws and observe the comity of nations, whatever they may mean in practice, but I protest against the monstrous fiction—­the transparent fraud—­that would seek in ninety years after the evacuation of New York by the British to bring the people of New York within the vision and venue of a British jury—­that in ninety years after the last British bayonet had glistened in an American sunlight, after the last keel of the last of the English fleet ploughed its last furrow in the Hudson or the Delaware—­after ninety years of republican independence—­would seek to restore that city of New York and its institutions to the dominion of the crown and government of Great Britain.  This is the meaning of it, and disguise it as you may, so will it be interpreted beyond the Atlantic.  Not that the people of America care one jot whether S.J.  Meany were hanged, drawn, and quartered to-morrow, but that there is a great principle involved.  Personally, I am of no consequence; politically, I represent in this court the adopted citizen of America—­for, as the New York Herald, referring to this case, observed, if the acts done in my regard are justifiable, there is nothing to prevent the extension of the same justice to any other adopted citizen of the States visiting Great Britain.  It is, therefore, in the injustice of the case the influence lies, and not in the importance of the individual.

“Law is called ‘the perfection of reason.’  Is there not danger of its being regarded as the very climax of absurdity if fictions of this kind can be turned into realities on the mere caprice of power.  As a distinguished English journalist has suggested in reference to the case, ’though the law may doubtless be satisfied by the majority in the Court of Appeal, yet common sense and common law would be widely antagonistic if sentence were to follow a judgment so obtained.’

“On all grounds then I submit, in conclusion, this is not a case for sentence.  Waving for the purpose the international objection, and appealing to British practice itself, I say it is not a fair case for sentence.  The professed policy of that practice has ever been to give the benefit of doubt to the prisoner.  Judges in their charges to juries have ever theorized on this principle, and surely judges themselves will not refuse to give practical effect to the theory.  If ever there was a case which more than another was suggestive of doubt, it is surely one in which so many judges have pronounced against the legality of the trial and the validity of the conviction on which you are about to pass sentence.  Each of these judges, be it remembered, held competent in his individuality