The Dock and the Scaffold | Page 8

could swear to their innocence was so great, that an attempt to press for convictions in their cases would be pertain to jeopardize the whole proceedings. The following is a list of the prisoners put forward, the names being, as afterwards appeared, in many cases fictitious:--
William O'Mara Allen, Edward Shore, Henry Wilson, William Gould, Michael Larkin, Patrick Kelly, Charles Moorhouse, John Brennan, John Bacon, William Martin, John F. Nugent, James Sherry, Robert McWilliams, Michael Maguire, Thomas Maguire, Michael Morris, Michael Bryan, Michael Corcoran, Thomas Ryan, John Carroll, John Cleeson, Michael Kennedy, John Morris, Patrick Kelly, Hugh Foley, Patrick Coffey, Thomas Kelly, and Thomas Scally.
It forms no part of our purpose to follow out the history of the proceedings in the Manchester court on the 25th of September and the following days: but there are some circumstances in connection with that investigation which it would be impossible to pass over without comment. It was on this occasion that the extraordinary sight of men being tried in chains was witnessed, and that the representatives of the English Crown came to sit in judgment on men still innocent in the eyes of the law, yet manacled like convicted felons. With the blistering irons clasped tight round their wrists the Irish prisoners stood forward, that justice--such justice as tortures men first and tries them afterwards--might be administered to them. "The police considered the precaution necessary," urged the magistrate, in reply to the scathing denunciations of the unprecedented outrage which fell from the lips of Mr. Ernest Jones, one of the prisoners' counsel. The police considered it necessary, though within the courthouse no friend of the accused could dare to show his face--though the whole building bristled with military and with policemen, with their revolvers ostentatiously displayed;--necessary, though every approach to the courthouse was held by an armed guard, and though every soldier in the whole city was standing to arms;--necessary there, in the heart of an English city, with a dense population thirsting for the blood of the accused, and when the danger seemed to be, not that they might escape from custody--a flight to the moon would be equally practicable--but that they might be butchered in cold blood by the angry English mob that scowled on them from the galleries of the court house, and howled round the building in which they stood. In vain did Mr. Jones protest, in scornful words, against the brutal indignity--in vain did he appeal to the spirit of British justice, to ancient precedent and modern practice--in vain did he inveigh against a proceeding which forbad the intercourse necessary between him and his clients--and in vain did he point out that the prisoners in the dock were guiltless and innocent men according to the theory of the law. No arguments, no expostulations would change the magistrate's decision. Amidst the applause of the cowardly set that represented the British public within the courthouse, he insisted that the handcuffs should remain on; and then Mr. Jones, taking the only course left to a man of spirit under the circumstances, threw down his brief and indignantly quitted the desecrated justice hall. Fearing the consequences of leaving the prisoners utterly undefended, Mr. Cottingham, the junior counsel for the defence, refrained from following Mr. Jones's example, but he, too, protested loudly, boldly, and indignantly against the cowardly outrage, worthy of the worst days of the French monarchy, which his clients were being subjected to. The whole investigation was in keeping with the spirit evinced by the bench. The witnesses seemed to come for the special purpose of swearing point-blank against the hapless men in the dock, no matter at what cost to truth, and to take a fiendish pleasure in assisting in securing their condemnation. One of the witnesses was sure "the whole lot of them wanted to murder everyone who had any property;" another assured his interrogator in the dock that "he would go to see him hanged;" and a third had no hesitation in acknowledging the attractions which the reward offered by the government possessed for his mind. Men and women, young and old, all seemed to be possessed of but the one idea--to secure as much of the blood-money as possible, and to do their best to bring the hated Irish to the gallows. Of course, an investigation, under these circumstances, could have but one ending, and no one was surprised to learn, at its conclusion, that the whole of the resolute body of stern-faced men, who, manacled and suffering, confronted their malignant accusers, had been committed to stand their trial in hot haste, for the crime of "wilful murder."
Of the men thus dealt with there are four with whose fate this narrative is closely connected, and whose names are destined to be long remembered in Ireland. They have won