After some share of preliminary remarks, the Chief Baron announced the
sentence of the court. It was for
John Warren, 15 years' penal servitude.
William Halpin, 15 years' penal servitude.
Augustine E. Costello, 12 years' penal servitude.
The prisoners heard the announcement without manifesting any emotion.
General Halpin remarked that he would take fifteen years more any day
for Ireland. Colonel Warren informed the Court that he did not think
a lease of the British Empire worth thirty-seven-and-a-half cents; and
then all three, followed by a _posse_ of warders, disappeared from the
dock.
And thus were three men of education and ability added to the hundreds
who are now rotting their lives away in British dungeons, because of
the love they bore to their country, and their hatred of the misrule
which makes her the most afflicted and miserable land on earth. It is
hard for Ireland to see such men stricken down and torn from her upon
such an accusation; yet, looking at the noble bearing of that long
list of devoted men when confronted with the worst terrors to which
their enemies could subject them, she has something which may well
cause the light of pride to glisten in her eyes, even while the tears
of love and pity are falling from them. And we would say to her in
the noble words of a French writer, one of the many generous-hearted
foreigners, whose affectionate admiration has been won by her
sufferings and her constancy, the Rev. Adolphe Perraud, Priest of the
Oratory, Paris:--
"Take heart! your trials will not last for ever; the works of iniquity
are passing and perishable: 'Vidi impium super exaltamum et elevatum
sicut cedros Libani, et ecce non erat!' (Ps. xvxvi.) Patience, then,
even still! Do not imagine that you are forsaken: God forsakes not
those that believe in Him. The day of retribution will come--to teach
men that no struggle against right is rightful, that probation is not
abandonment; that God and conscience have unimagined resources against
brutal spoliation and the triumphs of injustice; and that if men are
often immoral in their designs and actions, there is still in the
general course of history a sovereign morality, and judgments the
forerunners of the infallible judgment of God."