t to witnesses numbered ninety-eight
thousand.

It was a strange and fantastic scene. Three judges were trying a social
and political revolution. The leading actors in it were virtually in the
dock. The tribunal had been specially set up by their political opponents,
without giving them any effective voice either in its composition or upon
the character and scope of its powers. For the first time in England since
the Great Rebellion, men were practically put upon their trial on a
political charge, without giving them the protection of a jury. For the
first time in that period judges were to find a verdict upon the facts of
crime. The charge placed in the forefront was a charge of conspiracy. But
to call a combination a conspiracy does not make it a conspiracy or a
guilty combination, unless the verdict of a jury pronounces it to be one.
A jury would have taken all the large attendant circumstances into
account. The three judges felt themselves bound expressly to shut out
those circumstances. In words of vital importance, they said, "We must
leave it for politicians to discuss, and for statesmen to determine, in
what respects the present laws affecting land in Ireland are capable of
improvement. _We have no commission to consider whether the conduct of
which they are accused can be palliated by the circumstances of the time,
or whether it should be condoned in consideration of benefits alleged to
have resulted from their action._"(252) When the proceedings were over,
Lord Salisbury applauded the report as "giving a very complete view of a
very curious episode of our internal history."(253) A very complete view
of an agrarian rising--though it left out all palliating circumstances and
the whole state of agrarian law!

Instead of opening with the letters, as the country expected, the accusers
began by rearing a prodigious accumulation of material, first for the
Irish or agrarian branch of their case, and then for the American branch.
The government helped them to find their witnesses, and so varied a host
was never seen in London before. There was the peasant from Kerry in his
frieze swallow-tail and knee-breeches, and the woman in her scarlet
petticoat who runs barefoot over the bog in Galway. The convicted member
of a murder club was brought up in custody from Mountjoy prison or
Maryborough. One of the most popular of the Irish representatives had been
fetched from his dungeon, and was to be seen wandering through the lo