his
life? Above all, do you recall that final, and supreme, and awful touch
in which, addressing consciously the handler of the guillotine, he
professes to take him for the chaplain, and, bringing the poor
executioner for once to confusion, is addressed with blushing face and
trembling lips with the observation, "Non, Monsieur, j'ai d'autres
fonctions"?

[Sidenote: Green Street Court-House.]

Mr. Carson, doubtless, has "autres fonctions" than that of Jack
Ketch--who has always been so efficient and constant an instrument of
Government in Ireland--but I am never able to regard one part of the
official machinery by which wronged nations are held down as very
different from the other. Above all, I am unable to make much
distinction between the final agent in the gaol and those other actors
who play with loaded dice the bloody game in the criminal court with the
partisan judge and the packed jury. Doubtless, happy reader, you have
never been in a place called Green Street Court-House, in Dublin. If you
ever go to the Irish capital, pay that spot a visit. It will compensate
you--especially if you can get some _cicerone_ who will tell you some of
the associations that cling around the spot. It is in a back
street--narrow, squalid, filthy--surrounded by all those signs of
crumbling decay which speak more loudly to the visitor to Dublin of the
decay and destruction of a nation than fieriest orator or solidest
history. And in no part of Dublin have Death's effacing fingers worked
with such destructiveness as in all the streets that surround the Green
Street Court-House. Palatial mansions are windowless, grimy,
hideous--with all the ghastly surroundings of tenement homes of the very
poor.

It is in Green Street Court-House that the political offenders in
Ireland are tried. Within its narrow and grimy walls I saw many a
gallant Irishman, when I was a young reporter, pass through a foregone
and prearranged trial to torture, agony, madness, premature death. I
can only think of it as of a shambles, or, perhaps, to put it more
strongly, but more accurately, as I think of that wooden framework in
which I saw the murderer, Henry Wainwright, hanged by the neck one foggy
morning years ago, a gallows. The jury was packed, and the judges on the
bench were as much a part of the machinery of prosecution as the Counsel
for the Crown. The whole thing was a ghastly farce--as ghastly as the
private enquiries that intervene between the Russian