carriages and over dinner tables that the Whigs, tired with pursuing me, had given me a fair jury at last. But you and I, my Lord, know that it is to you, above all men, I owe my deliverance. I was honoured with your personal hatred; it became a passion with you to convict me; but your blind fury defeated its own purpose. At each new Commission I escaped in direct consequence of some new stroke of violence aimed at me. You called the devil to your aid, and your shots, like the fiend's bullets in "Der Freischütz," missed their victim, and struck your own purpose in the head. The goodness of God and the malice of the Irish Executive—these were the agents of my liberation. Mark how each new aggression defeats itself, as if this true history were some fanciful legend, written to exhibit the triumph of God's providence over the designs of the powerful of the earth.
At the beginning of August, '48, a month after my arrest, I wrote with my own lingers the usual instructions for counsel. They barely filled a sheet of notepaper; and said, in scarcely more words—" Deny nothing, and retract nothing, of what I have actually written or done. But explain my motives, and defend my character from the slanders of the Government Press. They are not content to transport me; they are conspiring to bury my name under a cairn of obloquy. Let them not succeed in this at least." Birch and a kennel of Birches, some of them nicknamed Mitchelite Republicans, were let loose on me. I was specially charged with advocating the doctrines of Blanqui, and of advising private assassination. I was held responsible for all the inane and vulgar atrocities of the United Irishman.
Had you brought me to trial in August, without suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, this defence was all you had to apprehend. I neither meditated a rescue by force nor a rescue by the stratagems of criminal law. I did not summon one witness. I and my three companions in Newgate regarded ourselves as indispensable victims to the necessities of the cause. It was too soon by some months to answer your indictment in the field, and no other answer was counted of much practical avail at that day.
But you suspended the Constitution, and the explosion came at once. Two terrible weeks of uncertainty, which
