, riotous, crime-loving, law-hating race. They
are for ever pointing to the unhappy fact--for, gentlemen, it is a
fact--that between the Irish people and the laws under which they now
live there is little or no sympathy, but bitter estrangement and
hostility of feeling or of action. Bear with me if I examine this
charge, since an understanding of it is necessary in order to judge
our conduct on the 8th December last. I am driven upon this extent of
defence by the singular conduct of the solicitor-general, who, with a
temerity which he will repent, actually opened the page of Irish
history, going back upon it just so far as it served his own purpose,
and no farther. Ah! fatal hour for my prosecutors when they appealed
to history. For assuredly, that is the tribunal that will vindicate
the Irish people, and confound those who malign them as sympathisers
with assassination and glorifiers of murder--

Solicitor-General--My lord, I must really call upon you--I deny that
I ever--

Mr. Justice Fitzgerald--Proceed, Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan--My lord, I took down the solicitor-general's words. I
quote them accurately as he spoke them, and he cannot get rid of them
now. "Glorifiers of the cause of murder" was his designation of my
fellow-traversers and myself, and our fifty thousand fellow-mourners
in the funeral procession; and before I sit down I will make him rue
the utterance. Gentlemen of the jury, if British law be held in
"disesteem"--as the crown prosecutors phrase it--here in Ireland,
there is an explanation for that fact, other than that supplied by
the solicitor-general; namely, the wickedness of seditious persons
like myself, and the criminal sympathies of a people ever ready to
"glorify the cause of murder." Mournful, most mournful, is the lot of
that land where the laws are not respected--nay, revered by the
people. No greater curse could befall a country than to have the laws
estranged from popular esteem, or in antagonism with the national
sentiment. Everything goes wrong under such a state of things. The
ivy will cling to the oak, and the tendrils of the vine reach forth
towards strong support. But more anxiously and naturally still does
the human heart instinctively seek an object of reverence and love,
as well as of protection and support, in law, authority, sovereignty.
At least, among a virtuous peo