"Had I been charged simply with my own words and deeds I would have no hesitation in making acknowledgement. I have nothing to repent and nothing to conceal—nothing to retract and nothing to countermand; but in the language of the learned Lord Chief Baron in this case, I could not admit 'the preposterous idea of thinking by deputy' any more than I could plead guilty to an indictment which charge others with crime. Further, my lords, I could not acknowledge culpability for the acts and words of others at a distance of three thousand miles—others whom I had never seen, of whom I had never heard, and with whom I never had had communication. I could not admit that the demoniac atrocities, described as Fenian principles by the constabulary-spy Talbot, ever had my sanction or approval or the sanction or approval of any man in America.
"If, my lords, six months' imprisonment was the admeasurement of the law officers of the crown as an adequate punishment for my alleged offence—assuming that the court had jurisdiction to try and punish—then, am I now entitled to my discharge independent of all other grounds of discharge, for I have gone through seven months of an imprisonment which could not be excelled by demon ingenuity in horror and in hardship—in solitude, in silence and in suspense. Your lordships will not only render further litigation necessary by passing sentence for the perhaps high crime—but still the untried crime—of refusing to yield obedience to the crown's proposition for my self-abasement. You will not, I am sure, visit upon my rejection of Mr. Anderson's delicate overture—you will not surely permit the events occurring, unhappily occurring, since my trial to influence your judgments. And do not, I implore you, accept as a truth, influencing that judgement, Talbot's definition of the objects of Feminism. Hear what Devany, the American informer, describes them to be. 'The members,' he says, 'were pledged by word of honour to promote love and harmony amongst all classes of Irishmen and to labour for the independence of Ireland.' Talbot says that in Ireland 'the members are bound by oath to seize the property of the country and murder all opposed to them.' Can any two principles be more distinct from each other? Could there be a conspiracy for a common object by such antagonistic means? To murder all opposed to your principles may be an effectual way of producing unanimity, but the quality of love and harmony engendered by such a patent process, would be extremely equivocal. Mr. Talbot, for the purposes of his evidence, must have borrowed a leaf from the History of the French Revolution, and adopted as singularly telling and appropriate for effect the saying attributed to Robespiere: 'Let us cut everybody's throat but our own, and then we are sure to be masters.'
"No one in America, I venture to affirm, ever heard of such designs in connexion with the Fenian Brotherhood. No one in America would countenance such designs. Revolutionists are not ruffians or rapparees. A judge from the bench at Cork, and a noble lord in his place in parliament, bore testimony to that fact, in reference to the late movement; and I ask you, my lords—I would ask the country from this court—for the sake of the character of your countrymen—to believe Devany's interpretation of Fenianism—tainted traitor though he be—rather than believe that the kindly instincts of Irishmen, at home and abroad—their generous impulses—their tender sensibilities—all their human affections, in a word—could degenerate into the attributes of the assassin, as stated by that hog-in-armour, that crime-creating Constable Talbot.
"Taking other ground, my lords, I object to any sentence upon me. I stand at this bar a declared citizen of the United States of America, entitled to the protection of such citizenship; and I protest against the right to pass any sentence in any British court for acts done, or words spoken, or alleged to be done or spoken, on American soil, within the shades of the American flag, and under the sanction of American institutions. I protest against the assumption that would in this country limit the right of thought, or control the liberty of speech in an assemblage of American citizens in an American city. The United States will, doubtless, respect and protect her neutrality laws and observe the comity of nations, whatever they may mean in practice, but I protest against the monstrous fiction—the transparent fraud—that would seek in ninety years after the evacuation of New York by the British to bring the people of New York within the vision and venue of a British jury—that in ninety years after the last British bayonet had glistened in an American sunlight, after the last keel of the last of the English fleet ploughed its last furrow in the Hudson or the Delaware—after ninety years of republican independence—would seek to restore that city of New York and its institutions to the dominion of the crown and government of Great Britain. This is the meaning of it, and disguise it as you may, so will it be interpreted beyond the Atlantic. Not that the people of America care one jot whether S.J. Meany were hanged, drawn, and quartered to-morrow, but that there is a great principle involved. Personally, I am of no consequence; politically, I represent in this court the adopted citizen of America—for, as the New York Herald, referring to this case, observed, if the acts done in my regard are justifiable, there is nothing to prevent the extension of the same justice to any other adopted citizen of the States visiting Great Britain. It is, therefore, in the injustice of the case the influence lies, and not in the importance of the individual.
"Law is called 'the perfection of reason.' Is there not danger of its being regarded as the very climax of absurdity if fictions of this kind can be turned into realities on the mere caprice of power. As a distinguished English journalist has suggested in reference to the case, 'though the law may doubtless be satisfied by the majority in the Court of Appeal, yet common sense and common law would be widely antagonistic if sentence were to follow a judgment so obtained.'
"On all grounds then I submit, in conclusion, this is not a case for sentence. Waving for the purpose the international objection, and appealing to British practice itself, I say it is not a fair case for sentence. The professed policy of that practice has ever been to give the benefit of doubt to the prisoner. Judges in their charges to juries have ever theorized on this principle, and surely judges themselves will not refuse to give practical effect to the theory. If ever there was a case which more than another was suggestive of doubt, it is surely one in which so many judges have pronounced against the legality of the trial and the validity of the conviction on which you are about to pass sentence. Each of these judges, be it remembered, held competent in his individuality to administer the criminal law of the country—each of whom, in fact, in his individuality does so administer it unchallenged and unquestioned.
"A sentence under such circumstances, be it for a long period or a short would be wanting in the element of moral effect—the effect of example—which could alone give it value, and which is professedly the aim of all legal punishment. A sentence under such circumstances would be far from reassuring to the public mind as to the 'certainties' of the law, and would fail to commend the approval or win the respect of any man 'within the realm or without.' While to the prisoner, to the sufferer in chief, it would only bring the bitter, and certainly not the repentant feeling that he suffered in the wrong—that he was the victim of an injustice based on an inference which not even the tyrant's plea of necessity can sustain—namely, that at a particular time he was at a distance of three thousand miles from the place where he then actually stood in bodily presence, and that at that distance he actually thought the thoughts and acted the acts of men unknown to him even by name. It will bring to the prisoner, I repeat, the feeling—the bitter feeling—that he was condemned on an unindicted charge pressed suddenly into the service, and for a constructive crime which some of the best authorities in the law have declared not to be a crime cognizable in any of your courts.
"Let the crown put forward any supposition they please—indulge in what special pleadings they will—sugar over the bitter pill of constructive conspiracy as they can—to this complexion must come the triangular injustice of this case—the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping in England—the unfair and invalid trial and conviction in Ireland for the alleged offence in another hemisphere and under mother sovereignty. My lords, I have done."