VOL. XII.
No. 2.
BOSTON.
FEBRUARY. 1900.
JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN. BY CLAUDE G. BOWERS. THE great advocate is embodied Justice. He stands between passion and reason, prejudice and innocence — and in the clear, pure tongue of truth directs the investiga tion for facts. Erskine pleading the cause of unlicensed printing, Mackintosh defending the liberty of utterance, Hamilton asserting the integrity of property over the passion of revolutionary hatred, Chativeau Lagarde, vithin the certain shadow of the guillotine, appealing to French honor in behalf of his beautiful queen, and Labori rising superior to his country as the mountain rears its head above the plain — these are among the heroic pictures of the world. Perhaps, in all the history of the British judiciary, there never was a time when a pa triotic advocate could give more and receive less, than during the period of Irish coercion, about the latter part of the last and the first of the present century. The intelligence and patriotism of Ireland beginning to rebel against the insufferable yoke of foreign dom ination, the English government attempted to quiet the murmurs through the intimida tion of a harsh domestic policy. Brutal, therefore, as were her measures in every de partment of the state, the' culmination of all the intolerable perfidy was reached, no doubt, in the management of her judiciary. It is doubtful if, in all the history of the world, there has been a baser travesty of justice than that which characterized the Irish state trial in the latter days of the last century — a travesty which borrowed meanness from the hypocrisy which accompanied it. Officers of state, solemnly sworn to the administration
of English justice, were black with the ver min of venality and crime. The whole fabric of the judiciary was as rotten as the princi ples of Castlereagh and his minions. Medi ocrity was dignified by a polluted ermine; courts of inquiry were transformed, under the leer of a degraded ministry, into inquisi tions; while men reasoned with threats, and convinced with powder. The fiercest bully became the greatest jurist, and the meanest informer, the purest patriot. Genius sacri ficed itself to Power and Peace, since Plunket, with an eloquence as rare as it was servile, scattered flowers in the path of his country's betrayers. Honor abdicated the bench and ascended the scaffold. The courts became farces more ludicrous than the French sense of honor. Trials for treason, upon the result of which rested the life of a man, the happi ness of a family, and the honor of a nation, were instituted in the morning and concluded at midnight. Short however, as was the period of torture, enough of injustice was crowded between the daybreak and the candlelight, to cast a shadow over the whole history of British justice. Truth was sup pressed as treasonable, and falsehood ac cepted as gospel, as it fell from the lips of men notoriously criminal and hopelessly de based. Prisoners were presumed to be guilty until they proved themselves innocent. One man alone, regardless of character, was suffi cient to convict a fellow-man, and hand him to the hangman. That one man, bearing the proud title of informer, was a sort of animal too foul for description, who, playing the friend and turning the spy, delivered his 57
