NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE State trial is over at last, and Mr. O'CONNELL and his fellows have been found guilty —the chief upon all sections of the charge, each of the rest upon one or other of those sections. Such, as the lengthened proceedings drew to a close, seemed the inevitable result. The acts alleged were patent to all the world: before the prosecution, everybody, unbiased by party predilections, had judged the Repealers guilty of some violation of the law, and only wondered when they were to be stopped or called to account : they were called to account, and the Court awaited their defence ; to make which, eight of the ablest counsel of the Dublin bar were engaged ; the sharpest astuteness of attornies was indefatigably exerted in their behalf; eloquence—super-Irish eloquence—blazed forth at their bidding ; the utmost legal ingenuity was bent to soften down their acts, parry the strict application of the law, show the accused to be philanthropists, philosophers, patriots, devoted to the welfare of a wronged country : but still there was no defence; the facts were not denied, no witnesses were called to disprove them, the acts and language imputed were notorious, and had been sedulously recorded by the accused themselves. "Liters scripta menet." The quasi-defence consisted mainly of evidence given by counsel, as to character ; of pleas that acts as bad had been committed before with impunity ; and of special interpretations of the law. As the facts were indisputable, and no attempt was made to question 'them, the case went to the Jury entirely on its own merits, un- incumbered by any question of doubt or credibility ; and the array of the evidence, remarshalled by the Solicitor-General, led as directly to the verdict as the stream of the Niagara to the cataract. It had been surmised that all the Judges would separately charge the Jury, and that some difference of opinion would be mani- fested; but the Bench was unanimous, and the Chief Justice spoke for all. He enlivened his speech with a few sallies not considered in England very appropriate to a judicial address, and growng ob- solete even in Ireland; but these disfigurements were small, and did not touch the essential points. Apart from such defects of style, the charge consisted of nothing but a very plain rehearsal of the most prominent facts, with the judicial interpretation of the law thereupon ; and if it was an instruction to convict, it appears to have been so only because the case itself, thus nakedly stated, led to conviction. All the startling points which the leading Re- peelers had employed for dramatic effect in their vocation, and which had appeared to us in England to trench so far upon legal sufferance,—the boasts of personal leadership—the threats of danger from without—the pretences that some slaughterous de- signs menaced Ireland from England, reviving the apocryphal horrors of Wexford—the attempts to discredit the administration of the law by the regular tribunals,—all rang again in the Judge's charge to the Jury ; and Chief Justice PENNEFATHER'S reiterated query, "Is this free discussion, or is it intimidation ?" extorted a verdict of "guilty" upon each branch of the charge. The Jury pronounced it. Technical "objections" were advanced to the very last, and remain to be decided ; a writ of error is threatened: but in the mean time—leaving the losing parties in Dublin to com- plain, and their partisans in Parliament to rail—we may accept as settled the broad construction of the actual law of Ireland as de- veloped by its authorized expositors.
Waiving the question of the policy of the prosecution—supposiew it to have been a necessary choice between alternative evirs—we think the retrospect of the-conduct of this great trial, as a whole, is creditable to the Govenutteut. At the outset there was an appear- ance of captiousness in the manner of the Attorney-General—a literality of lawyerlike exactness, somewhat derogatory to the dig- nity of a proceeding on behalf of the State. There does not appear to have been any malignant motive in that professional hardness— it was Mr. SMITH'S way of doing business; and as the trial ad- vanced it was considerably mitigated. His petulant temper once more displayed itself, to an extreme of impropriety in the highest officer of the law. But the bearing of the Government, considered apart from the idiosyncracies of their officer for the time being, shows blameless. There was no parade of privilege and preroga- tive ; on the contrary, the utmost possible latitude of time, of mode, of personal indulgence and freedom from restraint, was allowed to the accused. Some recent facts much modify the un- favourable look of the proceeding which excluded Roman Catholics from the Jury. The transitions of that case in its aspect to the public are curious. At first it was said that eleven Catholics, with a " sympathizer," were struck off as Catholics : very soon the " sympathizer" is dropped, and we hear no more of him : a Ca- tholic next drops out of the list, which is suddenly spoken of as ten : an affidavit is promised to prove that all of them were not Repealers,—it being implied that several, perhaps all, were free from that alliance with the accused : the affidavit is forgotten ; the case is closing, and the Solicitor-General remarks upon the otnis- lion ; it is supplied at the last—long after the rest of the evidence for the defence ; and it amounts to the assertion that the attornies for the accused believe two of the excluded Catholics not to have been actual subscribers to the Repeal Association, or active parti- cipators in its deeds. The affidavit does not state that they were not " sympathizers"; its silence respecting the other eight implies that they are active Repealers. Active Repealers are, by the ver- dict, participators in the conspiracy of which the accused are con- victed—all the active members of the Repeal Association, not in- cluded in the prosecution, are unarraigned conspirators. Ought any one of those eight, then, to have sat in judgment on the founder and chief of the Association, the arch-conspirator? Ought they not to have been excluded ? The charge against the Crown- lawyers has dwindled down to this—in exercising their duty to strike off, " without cause assigned," those whom they chose so to strike off, they struck off, out of ten Roman Catholics, two who are not known to be Repealers. But the gravamen of the charge was, not the exclusion of any one or two individuals—it was the whole- sale exclusion: the affidavit, limiting the charge to that particular exclusion, has justified the whole exclusion that took place. It may be, it is a very untoward circumstance, that Government is embarrassed with the virtual conviction of a host of unarraigned conspirators so numerous as the Repeal Association ; the country must be in a miserable state where these sweeping exclusions front the Jury-box occur to be justified ; but there is an advantage even in the authoritative exposition of that fact. Hundreds of thousands in Ireland are deliberately, formally, and avowedly banded against the law. That is a "great fact" for English rulers and legislators. If a verdict, with or without the punishment of O'CONNELL and his comrades, satisfies those statesmen, God help them ! O'CosateLL's power to sway his countrymen at the dictate of his indiscreet will has probably been impaired. He is made a martyr—but he is defeated: he may enjoy more sympathy, even of a kind that he would rather resent—but he has lost the prestige of uniform success. The self-delusion of years has been harshly con- futed. He seems to have acted throughout the Repeal agitation on a misconstruction of his own success in the Emancipation struggle. In some-respects, he went to work even with Catholic Emancipation wrongly : he sought to grasp his object at once, without the inter- vention of the Legislature. But it so happened that be had with him the matured opinion and spontaneous sympathy of the most intelligent class in England, and his error was lost in the general acclaim. The multitudinous numbers indeed, were against him, but the whole weight and force of English mind was with him. O'Corinsm, raised a critical interest in Catholic Emancipation ; and the legislative class of England, thus incited, carried its al- ready-formed will into effect. Then he succeeded. He tried the process again—grasped at his object more directly and more auda- ciously, by setting aside the Legislature altogether ; defying not the Government but the constitution, and attempting to frighten England. It is not England's weakness to be frightened : so that Mr. O'CONNELL made two mistakes—he overlooked the neces- sity of England's concurrence in any great measure' and he took the shortest way to prevent that concurrence. Such the difference in his means—strangely overlooked l—the difference in the result is, that by one path he became a legislator, by the other a convict.
