Part 1 — STEPHEN JOSEPH MEANY.

The connexion of Stephen Joseph Meany with Irish politics dates back to 1848, when he underwent an imprisonment of some months in Carrickfergus Castle, under the provisions of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. He had been a writer on one of the national newspapers of that period, and was previously a reporter for a Dublin daily paper. He joined the Fenian movement in America, and was one of the "Senators" in O'Mahony's organization. In December, 1866, he crossed over to England, and in the following month he was arrested in London, and was brought in custody across to Ireland. His trial took place in Dublin on the 16th of February, 1867, when the legality of the mode of his arrest was denied by his counsel, and as it was a very doubtful question, the point was reserved to be considered by a Court of Appeal. This tribunal sat on May the 13th, 1867, and on May the 18th, their decision confirming the conviction was pronounced. It was not until the 21st of the following month, at the Commission of Oyer and Terminer that he was brought up for sentence. He then delivered the following able address to show "why sentence should not be passed on him":—

"My lords—There are many reasons I could offer why sentence should not—could not—be pronounced upon me according to law, if seven months of absolute solitary imprisonment, and the almost total disuse of speech during that period, had left me energy enough, or even language sufficient to address the court. But yielding obedience to a suggestion coming from a quarter which I am bound to respect, as well indeed as in accordance with my own feelings, I avoid everything like speech-making for outside effect. Besides, the learned counsel who so ably represented me in the Court of Appeal, and the eminent judges who in that court gave judgment for me, have exhausted all that could be said on the law of the case. Of their arguments and opinions your lordships have judicial knowledge. I need not say that both in interest as in conviction I am in agreement with the constitutional principles laid down by the minority of the judges in that court, and I have sufficient respect for the dignity of the court—sufficient regard to what is due to myself—to concede fully and frankly to the majority a conscientious view of a novel and, it may be, a difficult question.

"But I do not ask too much in asking that before your lordships proceed to pass any sentence you will consider the manner in which the court was divided on that question—to bear in mind that the minority declaring against the legality and the validity of the conviction was composed of some of the ablest and most experienced judges of the Irish bench or any bench—to bear in mind that one of these learned judges who had presided at the Commission Court was one of the most emphatic in the Court of Criminal Appeal in declaring against my liability to be tried; and moreover—and he ought to know—that there was not a particle of evidence to sustain the cause set up at the last moment, and relied upon by the crown, that I was an 'accessory before the fact' to that famous Dublin overt act, for which, as an afterthought of the crown, I was in fact tried. And I ask you further to bear in mind that the affirmance of the conviction was not had on fixed principles of law—for the question was unprecedented—but on a speculative view of a suppositious case, and I must say a strained application of an already over-strained and dangerous doctrine—the doctrine of constructive criminality—the doctrine of making a man at a distance of three thousand miles or more, legally responsible for the words and acts of others whom he had never seen, and of whom he had never heard, under the fiction, or the 'supposition,' that he was a co-conspirator. The word 'supposition' is not mine, my lords; it is the word put forward descriptive of the point by the learned judges presiding at my trial; for I find in the case prepared by these judges for the Court of Criminal Appeal the following paragraph:—

"'Sufficient evidence was given on the part of the crown of acts of members of the said association in Ireland not named in the indictment in promotion of the several objects aforesaid, and done within the county of the city of Dublin, to sustain some of the overt acts charged in the indictment supposing them to be the acts of the defendant himself.'

"Fortified by such facts—with a court so divided, and with opinions so expressed—I submit that, neither according to act of parliament, nor in conformity with the practice at common law, nor in any way in pursuance of the principles of that apocryphal abstraction, that magnificent myth—the British constitution—am I amenable to the sentence of this court—or any court in this country. True, I am in the toils, and it may be vain to discuss how I was brought into them. True, my long and dreary imprisonment—shut away from all converse or association with humanity, in a cell twelve feet by six—the humiliations of prison discipline—the hardships of prison fare—the handcuffs, and the heartburnings—this court and its surroundings of power and authority—all these are 'hard practical facts,' which no amount of indignant protests can negative—no denunciation of the wrong refine away; and it may be, as I have said, worse than useless—vain and absurd—to question the right where might is predominant. But the invitation just extended to me by the officer of the court means, if it means anything—if it be not like the rest, a solemn mockery—that there still is left to me the poor privilege of complaint. And I do complain. I complain that law and justice have been alike violated in my regard—I complain that the much belauded attribute 'British fair play' has been for me a nullity—I complain that the pleasant fiction described in the books as 'personal freedom' has had a most unpleasant illustration in my person—and I furthermore and particularly complain that by the design and contrivance of what are called 'the authorities,' I have been brought to this country, not for trial but for condemnation—not for justice but for judgment.

"I will not tire the patience of the court, or exhaust my own strength, by going over the history of this painful case—the kidnapping in London on the mere belief of a police-constable that I was a Fenian in New York—the illegal transportation to Ireland—the committal for trial on a specific charge, whilst a special messenger was despatched to New York to hunt up informers to justify the illegality and the outrage, and to get a foundation for any charge. I will not dwell on the 'conspicuous absence' of fair play, in the crown at the trial having closed their cases without any reference to the Dublin transaction, but, as an afterthought, suggested by their discovered failure, giving in evidence the facts and circumstances of that case, and thus succeeding in making the jury convict me for an offence with which up to that moment the crown did not intend to charge me. I will not say what I think of the mockery of putting me on trial in the Commission Court in Dublin for alleged words and acts in New York, and though the evidence was without notice, and the alleged overt acts without date, taunting me with not proving an alibi, and sending that important ingredient to a jury already ripe for a conviction. Prove an alibi to-day in respect of meetings held in Clinton Hall, New York, the allegations relating to which only came to my knowledge yesterday! I will not refer with any bitter feeling to the fact that whilst the validity of the conviction so obtained was still pending in the Court of Criminal Appeal, the Right Hon. and Noble the Chief Secretary for Ireland declared in the House of Commons that 'that conviction was the most important one at the Commission'—thus prejudicing my case, I will not say willingly; but the observation was, at least, inopportune, and for me unfortunate.

"I will not speak my feeling on the fact that in the arguments in the case in the Court for Reserved Cases, the Right Hon. the Attorney-General appealed to the passions—if such can exist in judges—and not to the judgment of the court, for I gather from the judgment of Mr. Justice O'Hagan, that the right hon. gentleman made an earnest appeal 'that such crimes' as mine 'should not be allowed to go unpunished'.—forgetful, I will not say designedly forgetful, that he was addressing the judges of the land, in the highest court of the land, on matters of law, and not speaking to a pliant Dublin jury on a treason trial in the court-house of Green-street.

"Before I proceed further, my lords, there is a matter which, as simply personal to myself I should not mind, but which as involving high interests to the community, and serious consequences to individuals, demand a special notice. I allude to the system of manufacturing informers. I want to know, if the court can inform me, by what right a responsible officer of the crown entered my solitary cell at Kilmainham prison on Monday last—unbidden and unexpected—uninvited and undesired. I want to know what justification there was for his coming to insult me in my solitude and in my sorrow—ostensibly informing me that I was to be brought up for sentence on Thursday, but in the same breath adroitly putting to me the question if I knew any of the men recently arrested near Dungarvan, and now in the prison of Kilmainham. Coming thus, with a detective dexterity, carrying in one hand a threat of sentence and punishment—in the other as a counterpoise and, I suppose an alternative, a temptation to treachery. Did he suppose that seven months of imprisonment had so broken my spirit, as well as my health, that I would be an easy prey to his blandishments? Did he dream that the prospect of liberty which newspaper rumour and semi-official information held out to me was too dear to be forfeited for a trilling forfeiture of honour? Did he believe that by an act of secret turpitude I would open my prison doors only to close them the faster on others who may or may not have been my friends—or did he imagine he had found in me a Massey to be moulded and manipulated into the service of the crown, or a Corridon to have cowardice and cupidity made the incentives to his baseness. I only wonder how the interview ended as it did; but I knew I was a prisoner, and self-respect preserved my patience and secured his safety. Great, my lords, as have been my humiliation in prison, hard and heart-breaking as have been the ordeals through which I have passed since the 1st of December last, there was no incident or event of that period fraught with more pain on the one hand, or more suggestiveness on the other, than this sly and secret attempt at improvising an informer. I can forget the pain in view of the suggestiveness; and unpleasant as is my position here to-day, I am almost glad of the opportunity which may end in putting some check to the spy system in prisons. How many men have been won from honour and honesty by the stealthy visit to the cell is more of course than I can say—how many have had their weakness acted upon, or their wickness fanned into flame by which means I have no opportunity of knowing—in how many frailty and folly may have blossomed into falsehood it is for those concerned to estimate. There is one thing, however, certain—operating in this way is more degrading to the tempter than to the tempted; and the government owes it to itself to put an end to a course of tactics pursued in its name, which in the results can only bring its humiliation—the public are bound in self-protection to protect the prisoner from the prowling visits of a too zealous official.

"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:—

"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.

"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."