The Dock and the Scaffold Part 6

The CHIEF BARON--I will not allow you to proceed.

HALPIN--Well, I cannot be prevented thinking it. Now, I will refer to a subject which I may be allowed to speak upon. You will recollect that I had addressed a letter to Mr. Price, asking him to furnish me, at my own expense, with two of the morning papers--the _Irish Times_ and _Freeman's Journal_. I believe they are both loyal papers; at least they claim to be loyal, and I have no doubt they are of the admitted character of loyalty registered in the principles of Dublin Castle. The reason why I wanted these papers was, that I believed that the best reports of the trials since the opening of the Commission, would be found in them. I said to Mr. Price that it was important that I should see all the evidence given by the informers who were to be produced against me, to enable me to make up my defence. I was denied, even at my own expense, to be furnished with these papers, and that I complain of as a wanton outrage. Perhaps Mr. Price was governed by some rule of Kilmainham, for it appears that the rules of Kilmainham are often as far outside the law of the country as I have been said to be by the Attorney-General. In fact, Mr. Price stated when giving his testimony, that he was not governed by any law or rule, but that he was governed solely and entirely by his own imperial will.

CHIEF BARON--That I cannot allow to be said without at once setting it right. Mr. Price said no such thing. He said that with respect to one particular matter--namely, the reading of prisoners' correspondence, he was bound to exercise his own discretion as to what he would send out of the gaol, and what he would hold. This is the only matter in which Mr. Price said he would exercise his own discretion.

PRISONER.--I think, my lord, you will allow your memory to go back to the cross-examination of Mr. Price, and you will find that when I asked him by what authority he gave the letters he suppressed into the hands of the Crown to be produced here, he stated he had no other authority than his own will for so doing.

CHIEF BARON--You are quite right with respect to the correspondence.

PRISONER--I say he violated the law of the land in so doing, and I claim that he had no right to use those letters written by me in my private capacity to friends in America, asking for advice and a.s.sistance, and the very first letter that he read was a letter written to a man named Byrne.

That, you may recollect, was put into the hands of the Attorney-General--kept by him for four months. That was the first intimation I had of its suppression or of its production here by the Crown. Now, the letter was addressed to a friend in New York, asking him to look after my trunk, which had been taken away without my consent by the captain of the vessel in which I was arrested. Mr. Price never told me he suppressed that letter, and I was three months waiting for a reply, which, of course, I did not receive, as the letter never went.

Mr. Price suppressed another letter yesterday. It was written to a friend of mine in Washington, in relation to my trial and conviction, and asking him to present my case to the President of the United States, detailing the case as it proceeded in this court. Mr. Price thought proper to suppress that letter, and I ask that he be compelled to produce it, so that, if your lordships think fit, it may be read in court.

THE CHIEF BARON--I cannot do that. I cannot have a letter of that character read in open court.

HALPIN--Am I ent.i.tled to get the letter to have it destroyed, or is Price to have it, to do with it as he pleases?

THE CHIEF BARON--I can make no order in the matter.

HALPIN--Then Price is something like Robinson Crusoe--"Monarch of all he surveys;" monarch of Kilmainham; and when I ask if he is to be controlled, I find there is no law to govern him.

THE CHIEF BABON--you have now no property in these letters, being a convict.

THE PRISONER--I will very soon be told I have no property in myself. I claim to have been arrested on the high seas, and there was then no case against me, and the Crown had to wait four months to pick up papers and get men from Stepaside, and arrange plans between Mr. Price and his warders to fill up any gap that might be wanted. I was arrested out of the _habeas corpus_ jurisdiction, without authority, and detained four months in gaol until the Crown could trump up a case against me. Have I not a right to complain that I should be consigned to a dungeon for life in consequence of a trumped-up case? I am satisfied that your lordships have stated the case as it stands, but I am not satisfied that I have been convicted under any law. I have been four months in durance vile, and vile durance it has been. The preachers tell us that h.e.l.l is a very bad place, and the devil a very bad boy, but he could not hold a candle to old Price.

THE CHIEF BARON--You are trespa.s.sing very much upon a very large indulgence. I must adopt a more decisive course if you persevere.

HALPIN (laughing)--Well, my lord, I will say no more about the old gorilla. The Crown officers have laid much stress upon the fact that I have travelled under different names, and therefore I was guilty of a great crime. I have precedent for it when I read in the papers that some continental monarchs travel under an a.s.sumed name, and I hear that the Prince of Wales does so also when he thinks proper to go the London brothels.

At this point the Court cut short his address, and Chief Baron Pigot proceeded to pa.s.s sentence on the three prisoners.

THE SENTENCES.

After some share of preliminary remarks, the Chief Baron announced the sentence of the court. It was for

John Warren, 15 years' penal servitude.

William Halpin, 15 years' penal servitude.

Augustine E. Costello, 12 years' penal servitude.

The prisoners heard the announcement without manifesting any emotion.

General Halpin remarked that he would take fifteen years more any day for Ireland. Colonel Warren informed the Court that he did not think a lease of the British Empire worth thirty-seven-and-a-half cents; and then all three, followed by a _posse_ of warders, disappeared from the dock.

And thus were three men of education and ability added to the hundreds who are now rotting their lives away in British dungeons, because of the love they bore to their country, and their hatred of the misrule which makes her the most afflicted and miserable land on earth. It is hard for Ireland to see such men stricken down and torn from her upon such an accusation; yet, looking at the n.o.ble bearing of that long list of devoted men when confronted with the worst terrors to which their enemies could subject them, she has something which may well cause the light of pride to glisten in her eyes, even while the tears of love and pity are falling from them. And we would say to her in the n.o.ble words of a French writer, one of the many generous-hearted foreigners, whose affectionate admiration has been won by her sufferings and her constancy, the Rev. Adolphe Perraud, Priest of the Oratory, Paris:--

"Take heart! your trials will not last for ever; the works of iniquity are pa.s.sing and perishable: 'Vidi impium super exaltamum et elevatum sicut cedros Libani, et ecce non erat!' (Ps. xvxvi.) Patience, then, even still! Do not imagine that you are forsaken: G.o.d forsakes not those that believe in Him. The day of retribution will come--to teach men that no struggle against right is rightful, that probation is not abandonment; that G.o.d and conscience have unimagined resources against brutal spoliation and the triumphs of injustice; and that if men are often immoral in their designs and actions, there is still in the general course of history a sovereign morality, and judgments the forerunners of the infallible judgment of G.o.d."