Part 6

Here I should close the case--here I should shortly recapitulate my client’s defence, and leave him to your consideration; but I have been already too tedious, and shall do no more than recall to your recollection the purity, the integrity, the entire disinterestedness of Mr. Magee’s motives. If money were his object, he could easily procure himself to be patronized and salaried; but he prefers to be persecuted and discountenanced by the great and powerful, because they cannot deprive him of the certain expectation that his exertions are useful to his long-suffering, ill-requited country.

He is disinterested, gentlemen; he is honest; the Attorney-General admitted it, and actually took the trouble of administering to him advice how to amend his fortune and save his person. But the advice only made his youthful blood mantle in that ingenious countenance, and his reply was painted in the indignant look that told the Attorney-General he might offer wealth, but he could not bribe--that he might torture, but he could not terrify! Yes, gentlemen, firm in his honesty, and strong in the fervor of his love of Ireland, he fearlessly awaits your verdict, convinced that even you must respect the man whom you are called upon to condemn. Look to it, gentlemen; consider whether an honest, disinterested man shall be prohibited from discussing public affairs; consider whether all but flattery is to be silent--whether the discussion of the errors and the capacities of the ministers is to be closed forever. Whether we are to be silent as to the crimes of former periods, the follies of the present, and the credulity of the future; and, above all, reflect upon the demand that is made on you to punish the canvassing of abstract principles.

Has the Attorney-General succeeded? Has he procured a jury so fitted to his object, as to be ready to bury in oblivion every fault and every crime, every error and every imperfection of public men, past, present, and future--and who shall, in addition, silence any dissertation on the theory or principle of legislation? Do, gentlemen, go this length with the prosecutor and then venture on your oaths. I charge you to venture to talk to your families of the venerable liberty of the Press--the protection of the people against the vices of the government.

I should conclude, but the Attorney-General compels me to follow him through another subject.[6]

* * * * *

Let me transport you from the heat and fury of domestic politics; let me place you in a foreign land; you are Protestants--with your good leave, you shall, for a moment, be Portuguese, and Portuguese is now an honorable name, for right well have the people of Portugal fought for their country, against the foreign invader. Oh! how easy to procure a similar spirit, and more of bravery, amongst the people of Ireland! The slight purchase of good words, and a kindly disposition, would convert them into an impenetrable guard for the safety of the Throne and the State. But advice and regret are equally unavailing, and they are doomed to calumny and oppression, the reality of persecution, and the mockery of justice, until some fatal hour shall arrive which may preach wisdom to the dupes, and menace with punishment the oppressor.

In the meantime I must place you in Portugal. Let us suppose for an instant that the Protestant religion is that of the people of Portugal--the Catholic, that of the government--that the house of Braganza has not reigned, but that Portugal is still governed by the viceroy of a foreign nation, from whom no kindness, no favor, has ever flowed, and from whom justice has rarely been obtained, and upon those unfrequent occasions, not conceded generously, but extorted by force, or wrung from distress by terror and apprehension, in a stinted measure and ungracious manner; you, Protestants, shall form, not as with us in Ireland, nine tenths, but some lesser number--you shall be only four fifths of the population; and all the persecution which you have yourselves practised here upon Papists, whilst you, at the same time, accused the Papists of the crime of being persecutors, shall glow around; your native land shall be to you the country of strangers; you shall be aliens in the soil that gave you birth, and whilst every foreigner may, in the land of your forefathers, attain rank, station, emolument, honors, you alone shall be excluded; and you shall be excluded for no other reason but a conscientious abhorrence to the religion of your ancestors.

Only think, gentlemen, of the scandalous injustice of punishing you because you are Protestants. With what scorn--with what contempt do you not listen to the stale pretences--to the miserable excuses by which, under the name of state reasons and political arguments, your exclusion and degradation are sought to be justified. Your reply is ready--“perform your iniquity--men of crimes,” (you exclaim), “be unjust--punish us for our fidelity and honest adherence to truth, but insult us not by supposing that your reasoning can impose upon a single individual either of us or of yourselves.” In this situation let me give you a viceroy; he shall be a man who may be styled--by some person disposed to exaggerate, beyond bounds, his merits, and to flatter him more than enough--“an honorable man and a respectable soldier,” but, in point of fact, he shall be of that little-minded class of beings who are suited to be the plaything of knaves--one of those men who imagine they govern a nation, whilst in reality they are but the instruments upon which the crafty play with safety and with profit. Take such a man for your viceroy--Protestant Portuguese. We shall begin with making this tour from Tralos Montes to the kingdom of Algesiras--as one amongst us should say, from the Giant’s Causeway to the kingdom of Kerry. Upon his tour he shall affect great candor and good-will to the poor, suffering Protestants. The bloody anniversaries of the inquisitorial triumphs of former days shall be for a season abandoned, and over our inherent hostility the garb of hypocrisy shall, for a season, be thrown. Enmity to the Protestant shall become, for a moment, less apparent; but it will be only the more odious for the transitory disguise.

The delusion of the hour having served its purpose, your viceroy shows himself in his native colors; he selects for office, and prefers for his pension list, the men miserable in intellect, if they be but virulent against the Protestants; to rail against the Protestant religion--to turn its holiest rites into ridicule--to slander the individual Protestants, are the surest, the only means to obtain his favor and patronage. He selects from his Popish bigots some being more canine than human, who, not having talents to sell, brings to the market of bigotry his impudence--who, with no quality under heaven but gross, vulgar, acrimonious, disgustful, and shameless abuse of Protestantism to recommend him, shall be promoted to some accountant-generalship, and shall riot in the spoils of the people he traduces, as it were to crown with insult the severest injuries. This viceroy selects for his favorite privy councillor some learned doctor, _half lawyer, half divine, an entire brute_, distinguished by the unblushing repetition of calumnies against the Protestants. This man has asserted that Protestants are perjurers and murderers in principle--that they keep no faith with Papists, but hold it lawful and meritorious to violate every engagement, and commit every atrocity towards any person who happens to differ with Protestants in religious belief. This man raves thus, in public, against the Protestants, and has turned his ravings into large personal emoluments. But whilst he is the oracle of minor bigots, he does not believe himself; he has selected for the partner of his tenderest joys, of his most ecstatic moments--he has chosen for the intended mother of his children, for the sweetener and solace of his every care, a Protestant, gentlemen of the jury.

Next to the vile instruments of bigotry, his accountant-general and privy councillor, we will place his acts. The Protestants of Portugal shall be exposed to insult and slaughter; an Orange party--a party of Popish Orangemen shall be supposed to exist; they shall have liberty to slaughter the unarmed and defenceless Protestants, and as they sit peaceably at their firesides. They shall be let loose in some Portuguese district, called Monaghan; they shall cover the streets of some Portuguese town of Belfast with human gore; and in the metropolis of Lisbon, the Protestant widow shall have her harmless child murdered in the noon day and his blood shall have flowed unrequited, because his assassin was very loyal when he was drunk, and had an irresistible propensity to signalize his loyalty by killing Protestants. Behold, gentlemen, this viceroy depriving of command, and staying the promotion of, every military man who shall dare to think Protestants men, or who shall presume to suggest that they ought not to be prosecuted. Behold this viceroy promoting and rewarding the men who insulted and attempted to degrade the first of your Protestant nobility. Behold him in public, the man I have described.

In his personal concerns he receives an enormous revenue from the people he thus misgoverns. See in his management of that revenue a parsimony at which even his enemies blush. See the paltry sum of a single joe[7] refused to any Protestant charity, while his bounty is unknown even at the Popish institutions for benevolent purposes. See the most wasteful expenditure of the public money--every job patronized--every profligacy encouraged. See the resources of Portugal diminished. See her discords and her internal feuds increased. And, lastly, behold the course of justice perverted and corrupted.

It is thus, gentlemen, the Protestant Portuguese seek to obtain relief by humble petition and supplication. There can be no crime surely for a Protestant, oppressed because he follows a religion which is, in his opinion, true, to endeavor to obtain relief by mildly representing to his Popish oppressors, that it is the right of every man to worship the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience; to state respectfully to the governing powers that it is unjust, and may be highly impolitic, to punish men, merely because they do not profess Popery, which they do not believe; and to submit, with all humility, that to lay the burdens of the state equally, and distribute its benefits partially, is not justice, but, although sanctioned by the pretence of religious zeal, is, in truth, iniquity, and palpably criminal. Well, gentlemen, for daring thus to remonstrate, the Protestants are persecuted. The first step in the persecution is to pervert the plain meaning of the Portuguese language, and a law prohibiting any _disguise_ in apparel, shall be applied to the ordinary _dress_ of the individual; it reminds one of _pretence_ and _purpose_.

To carry on these persecutions, the viceroy chooses for his first inquisitor the descendant of some Popish refugee--some man with an hereditary hatred to Protestants; he is not the son of an Irishman, this refugee inquisitor--no, for the fact is notorious that the Irish refugee Papists were ever distinguished for their liberality, as well as for their gallantry in the field and talent in the cabinet. This inquisitor shall be, gentlemen, a descendant from one of those English Papists, who was the dupe or contriver of the Gunpowder Plot! With such a chief inquisitor, can you conceive anything more calculated to rouse you to agony than the solemn mockery of your trial? This chief inquisitor begins by influencing the judges out of court; he proceeds to inquire out fit men for his interior tribunal, which, for brevity, we will call a jury. He selects his juries from the most violent of the Popish Orangemen of the city, and procures a conviction against law and common sense, and without evidence. Have you followed me, gentlemen? Do you enter into the feelings of Protestants thus insulted, thus oppressed, thus persecuted--their enemies and traducers promoted, and encouraged, and richly rewarded--their friends discountenanced and displaced--their persons unprotected, and their characters assailed by hired calumniators--their blood shed with impunity--their revenues parsimoniously spared to accumulate for the individual, wastefully squandered for the state--the emblems of discord, the war-cry of disunion, sanctioned by the highest authority, and Justice herself converted from an impartial arbitrator into a frightful partisan?

Yes, gentlemen, place yourselves as Protestants under such a persecution. Behold before you this chief inquisitor, with his prejudiced tribunal--this gambler, with a loaded die; and now say what are your feelings--what are your sensations of disgust, abhorrence, affright? But if at such a moment some ardent and enthusiastic Papist, regardless of his interests, and roused by the crimes that were thus committed against you, should describe, in measured, and cautious, and cold language, scenes of oppression and iniquity--if he were to describe them, not as I have done, but in feeble and mild language, and simply state the facts for your benefit and the instruction of the public--if this liberal Papist, for this, were dragged to the Inquisition, as for a crime, and menaced with a dungeon for years, good and gracious God! how would you revolt at and abominate the men who could consign him to that dungeon! With what an eye of contempt, and hatred, and despair, would you not look at the packed and profligate tribunal which could direct punishment against him who deserved rewards! What pity would you not feel for the advocate who heavily, and without hope, labored in his defence! and with what agonized and frenzied despair would you not look to the future destinies of a land in which perjury was organized and from which humanity and justice had been forever banished!

With this picture of yourselves in Portugal, come home to us in Ireland; say, is that a crime, when applied to Protestants, which is a virtue and a merit when applied to Papists? Behold how we suffer here; and then reflect, that it is principally by reason of your prejudices against us that the Attorney-General hopes for your verdict. The good man has talked of his impartiality; he will suppress, he says, the licentiousness of the Press. I have, I hope, shown you the right of my client to discuss the public subjects which he has discussed in the manner they are treated of in the publication before you, yet he is prosecuted. Let me read for you a paragraph which the Attorney-General has not prosecuted--which he has refused to prosecute:

“BALLYBAY, July 4, 1813.

“A meeting of the Orange Lodges was agreed on, in consequence of the manner in which the Catholics wished to have persecuted the loyalists in this county last year, _when they even murdered some of them for no other reason than their being yeomen and Protestants_.”

And, again--

“It was at Ballybay that _the Catholics murdered one Hughes, a yeoman sergeant, for being a Protestant, as was given in evidence at the assizes by a Catholic witness_.”

I have read this passage from the _Hibernian Journal_ of the 7th of this month. I know not whether you can hear, unmoved, a paragraph which makes my blood boil to read; but I shall only tell you, that the Attorney-General refused to prosecute this libeller. Gentlemen, there have been several murders committed in the county of Monaghan, in which Ballybay lies. The persons killed happened to be Roman Catholics; their murderers are Orangemen. Several of the persons accused of these murders are to be tried at the ensuing assizes. The agent applied to me personally, with this newspaper; he stated that the obvious intention was to create a prejudice upon the approaching trials favorable to the murderers, and against the prosecutors. He stated what you--_even you_--will easily believe, that there never was a falsehood more flagitiously destitute of truth than the entire paragraph. I advised him, gentlemen, to wait on the Attorney-General in the most respectful manner possible; to show him this paragraph, then to request to be allowed to satisfy him as to the utter falsehood of the assertions which this paragraph contained, which could be more easily done, as the judges who went that circuit could prove part of it to be false; and I directed him to entreat that the Attorney-General, when fully satisfied of the falsehood, would prosecute the publisher of this, which, I think, I may call an atrocious libel.

Gentlemen, the Attorney-General was accordingly waited on; he was respectfully requested to prosecute upon the terms of having the falsehood of these assertions first proved to him. I need not tell you he refused. These are not the libellers _he_ prosecutes. Gentlemen, this not being a libel on any individual, no private individual can prosecute for it; and the Attorney-General turns his Press loose on the Catholics of the county of Monaghan, whilst he virulently assails Mr. Magee for what must be admitted to be comparatively mild and inoffensive.

No, gentlemen, he does not prosecute this libel. On the contrary, this paper is paid enormous sums of the public money. There are no less than five proclamations in the paper containing this libel; and, it was proved in my presence, in a court of justice, that, besides the proclamations and public advertisements, the two proprietors of the paper had each a pension of £400 per annum, for supporting government, as it was called. Since that period one of those proprietors has got an office worth, at least, £800 a year; and the son of the other, a place of upwards of £400 per annum: so that, as it is likely that the original pensions continue, here may be an annual income of £2000 paid for this paper, besides the thousands of pounds annually which the insertion of the proclamations and public advertisements cost. It is a paper of the very lowest and most paltry scale of talent, and its circulation is, fortunately, very limited; but it receives several thousands of pounds of the money of the men whom it foully and falsely calumniates.

Would I could see the man who pays this proclamation money and these pensions at the Castle. [Here Mr. O’Connell turned round to where Mr. Peele[B] sat.] Would I could see the man who, against the fact, asserted that the proclamations were inserted in all the papers, save in those whose proprietors were convicted of a libel. I would ask him whether this be a paper that ought to receive the money of the Irish people? Whether this be the legitimate use of the public purse? And when you find this calumniator salaried and rewarded, where is the impartiality, the justice, or even the decency of prosecuting Mr. Magee for a libel, merely because he has not praised public men, and has discussed public affairs in the spirit of freedom and of the constitution? Contrast the situation of Mr. Magee with the proprietor of the _Hibernian Journal_: the one is prosecuted with all the weight and influence of the Crown, the other pensioned by the ministers of the Crown; the one dragged to your bar for the sober discussion of political topics, the other hired to disseminate the most horrid calumnies! Let the Attorney-General now boast of his impartiality; can you credit him on your oaths? Let him talk of his veneration for the liberty of the Press; _can you_ believe him in your consciences? Let him call the Press the protection of the people against the government. Yes, gentlemen, believe him when he says so. Let the Press be the protection of the people; he admits that it ought to be so. Will you find a verdict for him that shall contradict the only assertion upon which he and I, however, are both agreed?

[B] Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant.

Gentlemen, the Attorney-General is bound by this admission; it is part of his case, and he is the prosecutor here; it is a part of the evidence before you, for he is the prosecutor. Then, gentlemen, it is your duty to act upon that evidence, and to allow the Press to afford some protection to the people.

Is there amongst you any one friend to freedom? Is there amongst you one man who esteems equal and impartial justice, who values the people’s rights as the foundation of private happiness, and who considers life as no boon without liberty? Is there amongst you one friend to the constitution--one man who hates oppression? If there be, Mr. Magee appeals to his kindred mind, and confidently expects an acquittal.

There are amongst you men of great religious zeal--of much public piety. Are you sincere? Do you believe what you profess? With all this zeal--with all this piety, _is_ there any conscience amongst you? _Is_ there any terror of violating your oaths? Be ye hypocrites, or does genuine religion inspire ye? If you be sincere--if you have conscience--if your oaths can control your interests, then Mr. Magee confidently expects an acquittal.

If amongst you there be cherished one ray of pure religion--if amongst you there glow a single spark of liberty--if I have alarmed religion, or roused the spirit of freedom in one breast amongst you, Mr. Magee is safe, and his country is served; but if there be none--if you be slaves and hypocrites, he will await your verdict, and despise it.[8]

LORD PALMERSTON.

The life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), covers so great a space of time elapsed and embraces so many high activities that few are the careers in English political history comparable to it. If one instinctively refers to the case of Mr. Gladstone, the nearest nineteenth century parallel, it is chiefly to observe the partly antithetical relation of the men: the one, a commoner always, the other, aristocrat by birth; each, in his time, Premier; and each preserving undimmed, past the great age of eighty years, distinguished powers of body and mind.

Lord Palmerston sprung from the Irish Temples, an ancient and honorable family. The whirligig of time has surely brought in no quainter changes than that the Temple of the Don Pacifico debate, the utterer of England’s downright word, the first Jingo of his period, should have descended, by near consanguinity, from the graceful, ineffectual Sir William Temple of Swift,--and, alas, of Bentley,--the gentleman who retired from the rude shock of politics to his Shene gardens, and who, instead of directing the troublous destinies of the state, penned models of prose style on gout and other gentlemanly things. And yet from the outset Lord Palmerston was destined to play a positive part in his world: as a man and a publicist he had few qualities that were not aggressive. A table condensed from the life by Bulwer gives in the most succinct form a view of how continuously he was in the thick of affairs.--

Born, Oct. 20, 1784 Succeeded to the Title, 1802 M. A., at Cambridge, 1806 Junior Lord of the Admiralty, 1807–1809 Secretary at War, 1809–1828 Secretary for Foreign Affairs, { 1830–34; 1835 { 1841; 1846–1851 Home Secretary, 1852–1855 Prime Minister, { 1855–1858; { 1859–1865