"I pass over all these things, my lords, and I ask your attention to the character of the evidence on which alone my conviction was obtained. The evidence of a special, subsidized spy, and of an infamous and ingrate informer.
"In all ages, and amongst all peoples, the spy has been held in marked abhorrence. In the amnesties of war there is for him alone no quarter; in the estimate of social life no toleration; his self-abasement excites contempt, not compassion; his patrons despise while they encourage; and they who stoop to enlist the services shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of such was the witness put forward to corroborate the informer, and still not corroborating him. Of such was that phenomenon, a police spy, who declared himself an unwilling witness for the crown! There was no reason why in my regard he should be unwilling—he knew me not previously. I have no desire to speak harshly of Inspector Doyle; he said in presence of the Crown Solicitor, and was not contradicted, that he was compelled by threats to ascend the witness table; he may have had cogent reasons for his reluctance in his own conscience. God will judge him.
"But how shall I speak of the informer, Mr. John Devany? What language should be employed in describing the character of one who adds to the guilt of perfidy to his associates the crime of perjury to his God?—the man who eating of your bread, sharing your confidence, and holding, as it were, your very purse-strings, all the time meditates your overthrow and pursues it to its accomplishment? How paint the wretch who, under pretence of agreement in your opinions, worms himself into your secrets only to betray them; and who, upon the same altar with you, pledges his faith and fealty to the same principles, and then sells faith, and fealty, and principles, and you alike, for the unhallowed Judas guerdon? Of such, on his own confession was that distinguished upholder of the British crown and government, Mr. Devany. With an affrontery that did not falter, and knew not how to blush, he detailed his own participation in the acts for which he was prosecuting me as a participator. And is the evidence of a man like that—a conviction obtained upon such evidence—any warrant for a sentence depriving me of all that make life desirable or enjoyable?
"He was first spy for the crown—in the pay of the crown, under the control of the crown, and think you he had any other object than to do the behests of the crown?
"He was next the traitor spy, who had taken that one fatal step, from which in this life there is no retrogression—that one plunge in infamy from which there is no receding—that one treachery for which there is no earthly forgiveness; and, think you, he hesitated about a prejury more or less to secure present pay and future patronage? Here was one to whom existence offers now no prospect save in making his perfidy a profession, and think you he was deterred by conscience from recommending himself to his patrons? Think you that when at a distance of three thousand miles from the scenes he professed to describe, he could lie with impunity and invent without detection, he was particular to a shade in doing his part of a most filthy bargain? It is needless to describe a wretch of that kind—his own actions speak his character. It were superfluous to curse him, his whole existence will be a living, a continuing curse. No necessity to use the burning words of the poet and say:—
"'May life's unblessed cup for him Be drugged with treacheries to the brim.'
"Every sentiment in his regard of the country he has dishonoured, and the people he has humbled, will be one of horror and hate. Every sigh sent up from the hearts he has crushed and the homes he has made desolate, will be mingled with execrations on the name of the informer. Every heart-throb in the prison cells of this land where his victims count time by corroding his thought—every grief that finds utterance from these victims in the quarries of Portland will go up to heaven freighted with curses on the Nagles, the Devanys, the Masseys, the Gillespies, the Corridons, and the whole host of mercenary miscreants, who, faithless to their friends and recreant to their professions, have, paraphrasing the words of Moore, taken their perfidy to heaven seeking to make accomplice of their God—wretches who have embalmed their memories in imperishable infamy, and given their accursed names to an inglorious immortality. Nor will I speculate on their career in the future. We have it on the best existing authority that a distinguished informer of antiquity seized with remorse, threw away his blood-money, 'went forth and hanged himself.' We know that in times within the memory of living men a government actually set the edifying and praiseworthy example of hanging an informer when they had no further use of his valuable services—thus dropping his acquaintance with effect. I have no wish for such a fate to any of the informers who have cropped out so luxuriantly in these latter days—a long life and a troubled conscience would, perhaps, be their correct punishment—though certainly there would be a consistent compensation—a poetic justice—in a termination so exalted to a career so brilliant.
"I leave these fellows and turn for a moment to their victims. And, I would here, without any reference to my own case, earnestly implore that sympathy with political sufferers should not be merely telescopic in its character, 'distance lending enchantment to the view;' and that when your statesmen sentimentalize upon, and your journalists denounce far-away tyrannies—the horrors of Neapolitan dungeons—the abridgement of personal freedom in Continental countries—the exercise of arbitrary power by irresponsible authority in other lands—they would turn their eyes homeward, and examine the treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners. I would, in all sincerity, suggest that humane and well-meaning men, who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a mercy, would rather implore that the doors of solitary and silent captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an immediate relief from suffering by immediate execution—the opportunity of an immediate appeal from man's cruelty to God's justice. I speak strongly on this point because I feel it deeply. I speak not without example. At the Commission at which I was tried there was tried also and sentenced a young man named Stowell. I well remember that raw and dreary morning, the 12th March, when handcuffed to Stowell I was sent from Kilmainham Prison to the County Gaol of Kildare. I well remember our traversing, so handcuffed, from the town of Sailing to the town of Naas, ancle deep in snow and mud, and I recall now with pain our sad foreboding of that morning. These in part have been fulfilled. Sunday after Sunday I saw poor Stowell at chapel in Naas Gaol drooping and dying. One such Sunday—the 12th May—passed and I saw him no more. On Wednesday, the 15th, he was, as they say, mercifully released from prison, but the fiat of mercy had previously gone forth from a higher power—the political convict simply reached his own home to die, with loving eyes watching by his death-bed. On Sunday, the 19th May, he was consigned to another prison home in Glasnevin Cemetery. May God have mercy on his soul—may God forgive his persecutors—may God give peace and patience to those who are doomed to follow.
"Pardon this digression, my lords, I could not avoid it. Returning to the question, why sentence should not be pronounced upon me, I would ask your lordships' attention to the fact showing, even in the estimate of the crown, the case is not one for sentence.
"On the morning of my trial, and before the trial, terms were offered to me by the crown. The direct proposition was made through my solicitor, through the learned counsel who so ably defended me, through the Governor of Kilmainham Prison—by all three—that if I pleaded guilty to the indictment, I should get off with six months' imprisonment. Knowing the pliancy of Dublin juries in political cases, the offer was, doubtless, a tempting one. Valuing liberty, it was almost resistless—in view of a possible penal servitude—but having regard to principle, I spurned the compromise. I then gave unhesitatingly, as I would now give, the answer, that not for a reduction of the punishment to six hours would I surrender faith—that I need never look, and could never look, wife or children, friends or family, in the face if capable of such a selfish cowardice. I could not to save myself imperil the safety of others—I could not plead guilty to an indictment in which six others were distinctly charged by name as co-conspirators with me—one of those six since tried, convicted, and sentenced to death—I could not consent to obtain my own pardon at their expense—furnish the crown with a case in point for future convictions, and become, even though indirectly, worthy to rank with that brazen battalion of venal vagabonds, who have made the Holy Gospel of God the medium of barter for their unholy gain, and obtained access to the inmost heart of their selected victim only to coin its throbbing into the traitor's gold and traffic on its very life-blood.