The trials may be said to have commenced
on the 26th of April, but the court opened on
the 24th. The jurymen summoned answered
generally to their names, and yet they knew
that an assassination committee existed, and
that the names of judges, jury, witnesses, and
prosecutors, were noted down for vengeance.
Such a list was found on one of those recently
condemned. I saw him in the dock, bearing
marks of the terrible blow he had received from
one of his own revolvers, in a struggle with three
policemen whom he had fired at in broad day
and in the open street. Two men, suspected
to be informers, had been shot dead; three
others had been severely wounded; they would
not say by whom. No guess could be made
respecting the numbers and place of this
murderous Vehm-Gericht. But the Panel
answered to their names fearlessly. As they
came forward, they were challenged "for cause."
The cause was almost invariably disallowed
after tedious discussion, and then they were
challenged "peremptorily" on the part of the
prisoners. I wondered why the advocates of
the accused objected to all, seriatim. Was it
in the vain hope of exhausting the Panel, and
thus rendering a trial impossible? Did there
exist upon the list, the name of a single
sympathiser with the conspiracy, and could it
be hoped that he might be placed, through an
excess of challenges, upon the jury? Two
whole days were spent before twelve men could
be chosen to try the accused. The prisoners, who
professed to ignore British law, availed themselves
very largely of all its provisions which are
supposed to be favourable to the arraigned.
Some few of the Panel were ordered to stand
aside, for reasons known only to the Crown
lawyers. But on the evening of the 25th of
April the jury was at last chosen, and on the
morning of the 26th the trials began.

Almost without exception the principal
conspirators on trial preserved a calm and dignified
deportment. There was nothing theatrical or
extravagant in their demeanour. Occasionally
they exchanged a few words with their solicitors.
Once, when the very man who was to
have led the rebel forces in the south, rose, like
a spectre, to the witness chair, one of the
accused changed his position with the other, and
fixed a stern gaze upon the informer for hours.

I look from the dock to the witness chair. The
informer cannot tell his own true name. There
is mystery or romance or shame about his
birth. As a child, he was sometimes called by
his mother's name; as a man, by one indicating
a connexion with an old Irish family. In youth,
he served with the British army in the
Crimea; then he fought under the famous
Kirby Smith as a faithful soldier of the
Confederate army. When the civil war was over,
he joined, as hundreds joined, the I. R. B., but
he united commercial pursuits with preparation
for treason. He was trusted beyond other
chiefs of the conspiracy, and, until the moment
of his arrest, was faithful. He revenged his own
betrayal, as he said, by betraying others. His
evidence was valuable: not so much because it
was damnatory to the accused, as for its
thorough exposure of the weakness and folly of
the conspiracy. In the city of Dublin, with
three hundred and forty thousand inhabitants,
there were, he said, from fourteen thousand to
eighteen thousand professed Fenians. Some of
these formed the wretched rabble that moved
out to Tallaght, and fled at the first touch of
the police. There were at hand, to arm these
eighteen thousand men, only three thousand
weapons; but what weapons? Pikes, old bayonets,
broken scythes, daggers made of iron hoops,
and sharpened knives. The rifles and revolvers
which were to sweep away the British army
did not count three hundred. In Cork, the
preparations were still more preposterous.
Fifteen hundred weapons of motley character to
arm twenty thousand Fenians! This man's
evidence exposes to all the world, the miserable
hollowness of the whole confederacy. But he
is released from a torturing cross-examination
at last, broken in health, and apparently
despairing. He swooned on the moment of his
arrest, and almost his last words, uttered with
some emotion, are: "If I swooned, would to
God I had never revived!"

Another Queen's evidence of a very different
stamp appears. His presence is anything but
prepossessing. Conspiracy can only be baffled by
the agency of conspirators, and this informer
had done his work thoroughly. He prided
himself upon his doings, and claimed credit
as the spoiler of the plot. His name was
taken (how or by whom none knows) from one
of Virgil's sweetest pastorals. He, too, had
fought in America, but as a lieutenant in the
Federal armies. Thus waifs and strays from
that gigantic struggle appeared in succession as
informers on a witness table in Dublin. For
seven months this man had been an active member
of the conspiracy, but all the while he was
also the paid agent of the government. He it
was whose secret information frustrated the
raid on Chester, caused the arrest of Massey
in the nick of time, and put the police on the
track of M'Cafferty. I noticed that this witness
was careful of his style, and corrected
himself when he spoke without due grammatical
precision. He was quick, ready, not easily
abashed—the very man to be an agent of
conspiracy, or its betrayer.

With the examination of the informers, all
interest in the trial ended until the verdict of
the jury had been pronounced, and the guilty
were called upon to state why sentence of
death should not be pronounced upon them.
The independent evidence was clear, the
facts were patent, the accused even boasted
of the part they had taken. Some of the condemned
spoke bitterly, respecting the deception
practised on them by the chief movers of the
plot in America. They had been told that a
hundred thousand men, armed and disciplined,
were ready to spring to their feet the moment
they had leaders. Others declared they would
act again as they had done before.

The barbarous form of sentence delivered on
those found guilty of high treason, makes the