ready to assert their claim, and so credulously disposed to believe that claim allowed.

There are some considerations respecting yourselves, and the defendant, to which I should wish to say a word. You may perhaps think your persons unsafe, if you find a verdict against so considerable a person. I know his power, as well as you doI know he might send you to the provost, as he has done the plaintiff, and forge a return on any writ you might issue for your deliverance-I know there is no spot in this devoted nation, (except that on which we now are,) where the story of oppression can be told or heard; but I think you can have no well founded apprehensions. There is a time, when cruelty and oppression become satiated and fatigued; in that satiety at least you will find yourselves secure. But there is still a better security for you: the gratitude of the worthy defendant-if any thing could add to his honours, and his credit, and his claims, it would be your verdict for the plaintiff; for in what instance have you ever seen any man so effectually accredited and recommended, as by the public execration? What a man, for instance, might not O'Brien have been, if the envy of the gibbet had not arrested the career of his honours and preferments? In every point of view, therefore, I recommend to you to find, and to find liberally for the plaintiff. I have founded my advice upon the real circumstances of your situation; I have not endeavoured to stimulate you into any silly hectic of fancied liberty. I do not call upon you to expose yourselves by the affectation of vindicating the cause of freedom and humanity; much less do I wish to exhibit ourselves to those whose property we are, as indignant or contumacious under their authority. Far from it, they are unquestionably the proprietors of us; they are entitled of right to drive us, and to work us; but we may be permitted modestly to suggest, that for their own sakes, and for their own interest, a line of moderation may be drawn. That there are excesses of infliction that human nature cannot bear. With respect to her western negroes, Great Britain has had the wisdom, and humanity to feel the justice of this observation, and in some degree to act upon it; and I have too high an opinion of that great and philosophical nation, not to hope, that she might think us not undeserving of equal mildness; provided it did not interfere with her just authority over us. It would, I should even think, be for

her credit, that having the honour of so illustrious a rider, we should be kept in some sort of condition, somewhat bordering upon spirit, which cannot be maintained, if she suffers us to be utterly broken down, by the malicious wantonness of her grooms and jockeys. Mr. Curran concluded by saying, that the cause was of no inconsiderable expectation; and that in whatever light the jury regarded it, whether with respect to the two countries, or Ireland singly, or to the parties concerned, or to their own sense of character and public duty, or to the natural consequences that must flow from the event, they ought to consider it with the most profound attention, before they agreed upon their verdict.

VERDICT FOR THE Plaintiff, 150L. DAMAGES AND COSTS.

SPEECH OF MR. CURRAN,

IN

DEFENCE OF OWEN KIRWAN,

FOR HIGH TREASON;

AT THE SESSION HOUSE, GREEN STREET, ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1803.

MR. CURRAN rose and said, that it had become his duty to state to the court and jury the defence of the prisoner. He said he had been chosen for that very unpleasant task, without his concurrence or knowledge; but as soon as he was apprised of it, he accepted it without hesitation. To assist a human being labouring under the most awful of all situations, trembling in the dreadful alternative of honourable life, or ignominious death, was what no man, worthy of the name, could refuse to man: but it would be peculiarly base in any person who had the honour of wearing the king's gown, to leave the king's subject undefended, until a sentence pronounced upon him had shown, that neither in fact, nor in law, could any defence avail him. He could not, however, but confess, that he felt no small consolation when he compared his present with his former situation upon similar occasions. In those sad times to which he alluded, it was frequently his fate to come forward to the spot where he then stood, with a body sinking under infirmity and disease, and a mind broken with the consciousness of public calamity, created and exasperated by public folly. It had pleased heaven that he should live to survive both those afflictions, and he was grateful to its mercy. I now, said he, come here through a composed and quiet city-I read no expression in any face, save such as marks the ordinary feelings of social life, or the various characters of civil occupation -I see no frightful spectacle of infuriated power, or suffering humanity-1 see no tortures-I hear no shrieks-I no longer see

the human heart charred in the flame of its own vile and paltry passions-black and bloodless-capable only of catching and communicating that destructive fire by which it devours, and is itself devoured.-I no longer behold the ravages of that odious bigotry by which we were deformed, and degraded, and disgraced -a bigotry against which no honest man should ever miss an opportunity of putting his countrymen, of all sects and of all descriptions, upon their guard: it is the accursed and promiscuous progeny of servile hypocrisy, of remorseless lust of power-of insatiate thirst of gain-labouring for the destruction of man, under the specious pretences of religion-her banner stolen from the altar of God, and her allies congregated from the abysses of hell, she acts by votaries to be restrained by no compunctions of humanity, for they are dead to mercy; to be reclaimed by no voice of reason, for refutation is the bread on which their folly feeds: they are outlawed alike from their species and their Creator; the object of their crime is social life, and the wages of their sin is social death; for though it may happen that a guilty individual should escape from the law that he has broken, it cannot be so with nations: their guilt is too extensive and unwieldy for such escape: they may rest assured that Providence has, in the natural connexion between causes and their effects, established a system of retributive justice, by which the crimes of nations are sooner or later avenged by their own inevitable consequences. But that hateful bigotry--that baneful discord, which fired the heart of man, and steeled it against his brother, has fled at last, and I trust for ever. Even in this melancholy place I feel myself restored and recreated by breathing the mild atmosphere of justice, mercy, and humanity-I feel I am addressing the parental authority of the law-I feel I am addressing a jury of my countrymen, my fellow subjects, and my fellow christians-against whom my heart is waging no concealed hostility—from whom my face is disguising no latent sentiment of repugnance or disgust. I have not now to touch the high raised strings of an angry passion in those that hear me-nor have I the terror of thinking, that if those strings cannot be snapt by the stroke, they will be only provoked into a more instigated vibration.

Mr. Curran then proceeded to observe, that this happy change in the minds and feelings of all men was the natural consequences of that system of mildness and good temper which had been

recently adopted, and which he strongly exhorted the jury to imitate, and to improve upon-that they might thereby demonstrate to ourselves, to Great Britain, and to the enemy, that we were not that assemblage of fiends which we had been alleged to be unworthy of the ordinary privilege of regular justice, or the lenient treatment of a merciful government.-He said, it was of the utmost importance to be on their guard against the wicked and mischievous representation of the circumstances which called them then together-they ought not to take from any unauthenticated report those facts which they could have directly from sworn evidence. He had heard much of the dreadful extent of the conspiracy against this country-of the narrow escape of the government. They now saw the fact as it was. By the judicious adoption of a mild and conciliatory system of conduct, what was six years ago a formidable rebellion, had now dwindled down to a drunken, riotous insurrection-disgraced, certainly, by some odious atrocities-its objects, whatever they were, no doubt, highly criminal; but, as an attack upon the state, of the most contemptible insignificance.-He did not wonder that the patrons of burning and torture should be vexed that their favourite instruments were not employed in recruiting for the rebellion. He had no doubt but that had they been so employed, the effect would have followed, and that an odious, drunken insurrection, would have been easily swelled into a formidable rebellion-nor was it strange that persons so mortified should vent themselves in wanton exaggerated misrepresentations, and in unmerited censure in slandering the nation in the person of the viceroyand the viceroy in the character of the nation-and that they should do so, without considering that they were weakening the common resources against common danger, by making the different parts of the empire odious to each other; and by holding out to the enemy, and falsely holding out, that we were too much absorbed in civil discord to be capable of effectual resistance. In making this observation, he said his wish was merely to refute a slander upon his country. He had no pretensions to be the vindicator of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, whose person he did not know that he had ever seen at the same time he said, that when he was so necessarily forced upon the subject, he felt no disposition to conceal the respect and satisfaction with which he saw the king's representative comport himself as he did, at a