families and your children, and, when you are presiding over the morality of the parental board, tell those infants, who are to be the future men of Ireland, the history of this day. Form their young minds by your precepts, and confirm those precepts by your own example; teach them how discreetly allegiance may be perjured on the table, or loyalty be forsworn in the jury-box; and when you have done so, tell them the story of Orr; tell them of his captivity, of his children, of his crime, of his hopes, of his disappointments, of his courage, and of his death; and when you find your little hearers hanging upon your lips, when you see their eyes overflow with sympathy and sorrow, and their young hearts bursting with the pangs of anticipated orphanage, tell them that you had the boldness and the justice to stigmatize the monster who had dared to publish the transaction!

THE SAME, CONTINUED.

I TELL you, therefore, gentlemen of the jury, it is not with respect to Mr. Orr that your verdict is now sought: you are called upon on your oaths to say, that the government is wise and merciful, that the people are prosperous and happy, that military law ought to be continued, that the British constitution could not with safety be restored to this country, and that the statements of a contrary import by your advocates in either country were libelous and false. I tell you these are the questions; and I ask you, can you have the front to give the expected answer, in the face of a community who know the country as well as you do? Let me ask you, how could you reconcile with such a verdict, the jails, the tenders, the gibbets, the conflagrations, the murders, the proclamations that we hear of every day in the streets, and see every day in the country? What are the

processions of the learned counsel himself, circuit after circuit? Merciful God! what is the state of Ireland, and where shall you find the wretched inhabitant of this land? You may find him perhaps in jail, the only place of security, I had almost said, of ordinary habitation; you may see him flying by the conflagrations of his own dwelling, or you may find his bones bleaching on the green fields of his country; or he may be found tossing upon the surface of the ocean, and mingling his groans with those tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home. And

yet, with these facts ringing in the ears and staring in the face of the prosecutors, you are called upon to say, on your oaths, that these facts do not exist. You are called upon, in defiance of shame, of truth, of honor, to deny the sufferings under which you groan, and to flatter the persecution that tramples you under foot.

CURRAN.

THE PUBLIC INFORMER.

Bur the learned gentleman is further pleased to say, that the traverser has charged the government with the encouragement of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and upon the solemnity of your oaths. You are upon your oaths to say to the sister country, that the government of Ireland uses no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers. Let me ask you honestly, what do you feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict that every man of us, and every man of you, know by the testimony of your own eyes to be utterly and absolutely false? I speak not now of the public proclamation of informers, with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward; I speak not of the fate of those horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory; I speak of what your own eyes have seen day after day, during the course of this commission, from the box where you are now sitting; the number of horrid miscreants who avowed upon their oaths that they had come from the very seat of government from the castle, where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation to give evidence against their fellows; that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness. Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked when he entered, how wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy in the undissembled homage of deferential horror?

the stormy

of his

power,

How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death; a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote There was an antidote prevent. a juror's oath but even that adamantine chain, that bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth; conscience swings from her mooring, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim..

CURRAN.

APPEAL TO THE JURY.

I Do not wonder that the government of Ireland should sand appalled at the state to which we are reduced. I wonder not they should start at the public voice, and labor to stifle or contradict it. I wonder not that at this arduous crisis, when the very existence of the empire is at stake, and when its strongest and most precious limb is not girt with the sword for battle, but pressed by the tourniquet for amputation; when they find the coldness of death already begun in those extremities where it never ends, that they are terrified at what they have done, and wish to say to the surviving parties of that empire, "They cannot say that we did it." I wonder not that they should consider their conduct as no immaterial question for a court of criminal jurisdiction, and wish anxiously, as on an inquest of blood, for the kind acquittal of a friendly jury. I wonder not that they should wish to close the chasm they have opened by flinging you into the abyss. But trust me, my countrymen, you might perish in it, but you could not close it; trust me, if it is y et possible to close it, it can be done only by truth and honor; trust me, that such an effect could no more be wrought by the sacri fice of a jury, than by the sacrifice of Orr. As a state measure, the one would be as unwise and unavailing as the other; but while you are yet upon the brink, while you are yet visible, let me, before we part, remind you once more of your awful situation. The law upon this subject gives you supreme dominion. Hope not for much assistance from his lordship. On such occasions, perhaps the duty of the court is to be cold and neutral. I cannot but admire the dignity he has supported during this trial; I am grateful for his patience. But let me tell you, it is not his province to fan the sacred flame of patriotism in the jury.

box; as he has borne with the little extravagances of the law, do you bear with the little failing of the press. Let me therefore remind you, that, though the day may soon come when our ashes shall be scattered before the winds of heaven, the memory of what you do cannot die; it will carry down to your posterity your honor or your shame. In the presence and in the name of the ever-living God, I do therefore conjure you to reflect that you have your characters, your consciences, that you have also the character, perhaps the ultimate destiny, of your country in your hands. In that awful name, I do conjure you to have mercy upon your country and yourselves, and so judge now, as you will hereafter be judged: and I do now submit the fate of my client, and of that country which we yet have in common, to your disposal.

CURRAN.

SPEECH OF MR. PHILLIPS,

At a Meeting of the British and Foreign Auxiliary Bible Society, London

ALTHOUGH I have not had the honor either of proposing or seconding any of your resolutions, still, as a native of that country so pointedly alluded to in your report, I hope I may be indulged in a few observations. The crisis in which we are placed is, I hope, a sufficient apology in itself for any intrusion; but I find such apology is rendered more than unnecessary by the courtesy of this reception. Indeed, my lord, when we see omens which are every day arising when we see blasphemy openly avowed when we see the Scriptures audaciously ridiculed-when, in this Christian monarchy, the den of the repub lican and the deist yawns for the unwary in your most public thoroughfares when marts are ostentatiously opened, where the moral poison may be purchased, whose subtile venom enters the very soul when infidelity has become an article of commerce, and man's perdition may be cheapened at the stall of every peddler- no friend of society should continue silent. is no longer a question of political privilege of sectarian controversy of theological discussion; it is become a question, whether Christianity itself shall stand, or whether we shall let go the firm anchor of our faith, and drift without chart, or helm or compass, into the shoreless ocean of impiety and blood! I despise as much as any man the whine of bigotry-1 will far as any man for rational liberty, but I will not depose my God to deify the infidel, or tear in pieces the charter of it o state,

It

go as

"

1

and grope for a constitution amongst the murky pigeon-holes of every creedless, lawless, infuriated regicide.

When I saw, the other day, my lord, the chief bacchanal of their orgies the man with whom the apostles were cheats, and the prophets liars, and Jesus an impostor- on his memorable trial, withering hour after hour with the most horrid blasphemies surrounded by the votaries of every sect, and the heads of every faith the Christian archbishop- the Jewish rabbithe men most eminent for their piety and their learning, whom he had purposely collected to hear his infidel ridicule of all they reverenced when I saw him raise the Holy Bible in one hand and the Age of Reason in the other, as it were confronting the Almighty with a rebel worm, till the pious judge grew pale, and the patient jury interposed, and the self-convicted wretch himself, after having raved away all his original impiety, was reduced into a mere machine for the reproduction of the ribald blasphemy of others—I could not help exclaiming, "Infatuated man! if all your impracticable madness could be realized, what would you give us in exchange for our establishment? What would you substitute for that just tribunal ? for whom would you displace that independent judge and that impartial jury? Would you really burn the Gospel and erase the statutes, for the dreadful equivalent of the crucifix and the guillotine!" Indeed, if I was asked for a practical panegyric on our constitution, I would adduce the very trial of that criminal; and if the legal annals of any country upon earth furnished an instance, not merely of such justice, but of such patience and forbearance, such almost culpable indulgence, I would concede to him the triumph. I hope, too, in what I say, I shall not be considered as forsaking that illustrious example-I hope I am above an insult on any man in his situation perhaps, had I the power, I would follow the example further than I ought—perhaps I would even humble him into an evidence of the very spirit he spurned — and as our creed was reviled in his person, and vindicated in his conviction, so I would give it its noblest triumph in his sentence, and merely consign him to the punishment of its mercy.

THE SAME, CONTINUED

BUT, indeed, my lord, the fate of this half infidel, half trading martyr, matters very little in comparison of that of the thousands he has corrupted. He has literally disseminated a moral plague.