The connexion of Stephen Joseph Meany with Irish politics dates back to
1848, when he underwent an imprisonment of some months in Carrickfergus
Castle, under the provisions of the _Habeas Corpus_ Suspension Act. He
had been a writer on one of the national newspapers of that period, and
was previously a reporter for a Dublin daily paper. He joined the Fenian
movement in America, and was one of the "Senators" in O'Mahony's
organization. In December, 1866, he crossed over to England, and in the
following month he was arrested in London, and was brought in custody
across to Ireland. His trial took place in Dublin on the 16th of
February, 1867, when the legality of the mode of his arrest was denied
by his counsel, and as it was a very doubtful question, the point was
reserved to be considered by a Court of Appeal. This tribunal sat on May
the 13th, 1867, and on May the 18th, their decision confirming the
conviction was pronounced. It was not until the 21st of the following
month, at the Commission of Oyer and Terminer that he was brought up for
sentence. He then delivered the following able address to show "why
sentence should not be passed on him":--
"My lords--There are many reasons I could offer why sentence should
not--could not--be pronounced upon me according to law, if seven
months of absolute solitary imprisonment, and the almost total disuse
of speech during that period, had left me energy enough, or even
language sufficient to address the court. But yielding obedience to a
suggestion coming from a quarter which I am bound to respect, as well
indeed as in accordance with my own feelings, I avoid everything like
speech-making for outside effect. Besides, the learned counsel who so
ably represented me in the Court of Appeal, and the eminent judges
who in that court gave judgment for me, have exhausted all that could
be said on the law of the case. Of their arguments and opinions your
lordships have judicial knowledge. I need not say that both in
interest as in conviction I am in agreement with the constitutional
principles laid down by the minority of the judges in that court, and
I have sufficient respect for the dignity of the court--sufficient
regard to what is due to myself--to concede fully and frankly to the
majority a conscientious view of a novel and, it may be, a difficult
question.
"But I do not ask too much in asking that before your lordships
proceed to pass any sentence you will consider the manner in which
the court was divided on that question--to bear in mind that the
minority declaring against the legality and the validity of the
conviction was composed of some of the ablest and most experienced
judges of the Irish bench or any bench--to bear in mind that one of
these learned judges who had presided at the Commission Court was one
of the most emphatic in the Court of Criminal Appeal in declaring
against my liability to be tried; and moreover--and he ought to
know--that there was not a particle of evidence to sustain the cause
set up at the last moment, and relied upon by the crown, that I was
an 'accessory before the fact' to that famous Dublin overt act, for
which, as an afterthought of the crown, I was in fact tried. And I
ask you further to bear in mind that the affirmance of the conviction
was not had on fixed principles of law--for the question was
unprecedented--but on a speculative view of a suppositious case, and
I must say a strained application of an already over-strained and
dangerous doctrine--the doctrine of constructive criminality--the
doctrine of making a man at a distance of three thousand miles or
more, legally responsible for the words and acts of others whom he
had never seen, and of whom he had never heard, under the fiction, or
the 'supposition,' that he was a co-conspirator. The word
'supposition' is not mine, my lords; it is the word put forward
descriptive of the point by the learned judges presiding at my trial;
for I find in the case prepared by these judges for the Court of
Criminal Appeal the following paragraph:--
"'Sufficient evidence was given on the part of the crown of acts of
members of the said association in Ireland not named in the
indictment in promotion of the several objects aforesaid, and done
within the county of the city of Dublin, to sustain some of the overt
acts charged in the indictment supposing them to be the acts of the
defendant himself.'
"Fortified by such facts--with a court so divided, and with opinions
so expressed--I submit that, neither according to act of parliament,
nor in conformity with the practice at common law, nor in any way in
pursuance of the principles of that apocryphal abstraction, that
magnificent myth--the British constitution--am I amenable to the
sentence of this court--or any court in this country. True, I am in
the toils, and it may be vain to discuss how I was brought into them.
True, my long and dreary imprisonment--shut away from all converse or
association with humanity, in a cell twelve feet by six--the
humiliations of prison discipline--the hardships of prison fare--the
handcuffs, and the heartburnings--this court and its surroundings of
power and authority--all these are 'hard practical facts,' which no
amount of indignant protests can negative--no denunciation of the
wrong refine away; and it may be, as I have said, worse than
useless--vain and absurd--to question the right where might is
predominant. But the invitation just extended to me by the officer of
the court means, if it means anything--if it be not like the rest, a
solemn mockery--that there still is left to me the poor privilege of
complaint. And I do complain. I complain that law and justice have
been alike violated in my regard--I complain that the much belauded
attribute 'British fair play' has been for me a nullity--I complain
that the pleasant fiction described in the books as 'personal
freedom' has had a most unpleasant illustration in my person--and I
furthermore and particularly complain that by the design and
contrivance of what are called 'the authorities,' I have been brought
to this country, not for trial but for condemnation--not for justice
but for judgment.
"I will not tire the patience of the court, or exhaust my own
strength, by going over the history of this painful case--the
kidnapping in London on the mere belief of a police-constable that I
was a Fenian in New York--the illegal transportation to Ireland--the
committal for trial on a specific charge, whilst a special messenger
was despatched to New York to hunt up informers to justify the
illegality and the outrage, and to get a foundation for any charge. I
will not dwell on the 'conspicuous absence' of fair play, in the
crown at the trial having closed their cases without any reference to
the Dublin transaction, but, as an afterthought, suggested by their
discovered failure, giving in evidence the facts and circumstances of
that case, and thus succeeding in making the jury convict me for an
offence with which up to that moment the crown did not intend to
charge me. I will not say what I think of the mockery of putting me
on trial in the Commission Court in Dublin for alleged words and acts
in New York, and though the evidence was without notice, and the
alleged overt acts without date, taunting me with not proving an
_alibi_, and sending that important ingredient to a jury already ripe
for a conviction. Prove an _alibi_ to-day in respect of meetings held
in Clinton Hall, New York, the allegations relating to which only
came to my knowledge yesterday! I will not refer with any bitter
feeling to the fact that whilst the validity of the conviction so
obtained was still pending in the Court of Criminal Appeal, the Right
Hon. and Noble the Chief Secretary for Ireland declared in the House
of Commons that 'that conviction was the most important one at the
Commission'--thus prejudicing my case, I will not say willingly; but
the observation was, at least, inopportune, and for me unfortunate.
"I will not speak my feeling on the fact that in the arguments in the
case in the Court for Reserved Cases, the Right Hon. the
Attorney-General appealed to the passions--if such can exist in
judges--and not to the judgment of the court, for I gather from the
judgment of Mr. Justice O'Hagan, that the right hon. gentleman made
an earnest appeal 'that such crimes' as mine 'should not be allowed
to go unpunished'.--forgetful, I will not say designedly forgetful,
that he was addressing the judges of the land, in the highest court
of the land, on matters of law, and not speaking to a pliant Dublin
jury on a treason trial in the court-house of Green-street.
"Before I proceed further, my lords, there is a matter which, as
simply personal to myself I should not mind, but which as involving
high interests to the community, and serious consequences to
individuals, demand a special notice. I allude to the system of
manufacturing informers. I want to know, if the court can inform me,
by what right a responsible officer of the crown entered my solitary
cell at Kilmainham prison on Monday last--unbidden and
unexpected--uninvited and undesired. I want to know what
justification there was for his coming to insult me in my solitude
and in my sorrow--ostensibly informing me that I was to be brought up
for sentence on Thursday, but in the same breath adroitly putting to
me the question if I knew any of the men recently arrested near
Dungarvan, and now in the prison of Kilmainham. Coming thus, with a
detective dexterity, carrying in one hand a threat of sentence and
punishment--in the other as a counterpoise and, I suppose an
alternative, a temptation to treachery. Did he suppose that seven
months of imprisonment had so broken my spirit, as well as my health,
that I would be an easy prey to his blandishments? Did he dream that
the prospect of liberty which newspaper rumour and semi-official
information held out to me was too dear to be forfeited for a
trilling forfeiture of honour? Did he believe that by an act of
secret turpitude I would open my prison doors only to close them the
faster on others who may or may not have been my friends--or did he
imagine he had found in me a Massey to be moulded and manipulated
into the service of the crown, or a Corridon to have cowardice and
cupidity made the incentives to his baseness. I only wonder how the
interview ended as it did; but I knew I was a prisoner, and
self-respect preserved my patience and secured his safety. Great, my
lords, as have been my humiliation in prison, hard and heart-breaking
as have been the ordeals through which I have passed since the 1st of
December last, there was no incident or event of that period fraught
with more pain on the one hand, or more suggestiveness on the other,
than this sly and secret attempt at improvising an informer. I can
forget the pain in view of the suggestiveness; and unpleasant as is
my position here to-day, I am almost glad of the opportunity which
may end in putting some check to the spy system in prisons. How many
men have been won from honour and honesty by the stealthy visit to
the cell is more of course than I can say--how many have had their
weakness acted upon, or their wickness fanned into flame by which
means I have no opportunity of knowing--in how many frailty and folly
may have blossomed into falsehood it is for those concerned to
estimate. There is one thing, however, certain--operating in this way
is more degrading to the tempter than to the tempted; and the
government owes it to itself to put an end to a course of tactics
pursued in its name, which in the results can only bring its
humiliation--the public are bound in self-protection to protect the
prisoner from the prowling visits of a too zealous official.
"I pass over all these things, my lords, and I ask your attention to
the character of the evidence on which alone my conviction was
obtained. The evidence of a special, subsidized spy, and of an
infamous and ingrate informer.
"In all ages, and amongst all peoples, the spy has been held in
marked abhorrence. In the amnesties of war there is for him alone no
quarter; in the estimate of social life no toleration; his
self-abasement excites contempt, not compassion; his patrons despise
while they encourage; and they who stoop to enlist the services
shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of
such was the witness put forward to corroborate the informer, and
still not corroborating him. Of such was that phenomenon, a police
spy, who declared himself an unwilling witness for the crown! There
was no reason why in my regard he should be unwilling--he knew me not
previously. I have no desire to speak harshly of Inspector Doyle; he
said in presence of the Crown Solicitor, and was not contradicted,
that he was compelled by threats to ascend the witness table; he may
have had cogent reasons for his reluctance in his own conscience. God
will judge him.
"But how shall I speak of the informer, Mr. John Devany? What
language should be employed in describing the character of one who
adds to the guilt of perfidy to his associates the crime of perjury
to his God?--the man who eating of your bread, sharing your
confidence, and holding, as it were, your very purse-strings, all the
time meditates your overthrow and pursues it to its accomplishment?
How paint the wretch who, under pretence of agreement in your
opinions, worms himself into your secrets only to betray them; and
who, upon the same altar with you, pledges his faith and fealty to
the same principles, and then sells faith, and fealty, and
principles, and you alike, for the unhallowed Judas guerdon? Of such,
on his own confession was that distinguished upholder of the British
crown and government, Mr. Devany. With an affrontery that did not
falter, and knew not how to blush, he detailed his own participation
in the acts for which he was prosecuting me as a participator. And is
the evidence of a man like that--a conviction obtained upon such
evidence--any warrant for a sentence depriving me of all that make
life desirable or enjoyable?
"He was first spy for the crown--in the pay of the crown, under the
control of the crown, and think you he had any other object than to
do the behests of the crown?
"He was next the traitor spy, who had taken that one fatal step, from
which in this life there is no retrogression--that one plunge in
infamy from which there is no receding--that one treachery for which
there is no earthly forgiveness; and, think you, he hesitated about a
prejury more or less to secure present pay and future patronage? Here
was one to whom existence offers now no prospect save in making his
perfidy a profession, and think you he was deterred by conscience
from recommending himself to his patrons? Think you that when at a
distance of three thousand miles from the scenes he professed to
describe, he could lie with impunity and invent without detection, he
was particular to a shade in doing his part of a most filthy bargain?
It is needless to describe a wretch of that kind--his own actions
speak his character. It were superfluous to curse him, his whole
existence will be a living, a continuing curse. No necessity to use
the burning words of the poet and say:--
"'May life's unblessed cup for him
Be drugged with treacheries to the brim.'
"Every sentiment in his regard of the country he has dishonoured, and
the people he has humbled, will be one of horror and hate. Every sigh
sent up from the hearts he has crushed and the homes he has made
desolate, will be mingled with execrations on the name of the
informer. Every heart-throb in the prison cells of this land where
his victims count time by corroding his thought--every grief that
finds utterance from these victims in the quarries of Portland will
go up to heaven freighted with curses on the Nagles, the Devanys, the
Masseys, the Gillespies, the Corridons, and the whole host of
mercenary miscreants, who, faithless to their friends and recreant to
their professions, have, paraphrasing the words of Moore, taken their
perfidy to heaven seeking to make accomplice of their God--wretches
who have embalmed their memories in imperishable infamy, and given
their accursed names to an inglorious immortality. Nor will I
speculate on their career in the future. We have it on the best
existing authority that a distinguished informer of antiquity seized
with remorse, threw away his blood-money, 'went forth and hanged
himself.' We know that in times within the memory of living men a
government actually set the edifying and praiseworthy example of
hanging an informer when they had no further use of his valuable
services--thus _dropping_ his acquaintance with effect. I have no
wish for such a fate to any of the informers who have cropped out so
luxuriantly in these latter days--a long life and a troubled
conscience would, perhaps, be their correct punishment--though
certainly there would be a consistent compensation--a poetic
justice--in a termination so exalted to a career so brilliant.
"I leave these fellows and turn for a moment to their victims. And, I
would here, without any reference to my own case, earnestly implore
that sympathy with political sufferers should not be merely
telescopic in its character, 'distance lending enchantment to the
view;' and that when your statesmen sentimentalize upon, and your
journalists denounce far-away tyrannies--the horrors of Neapolitan
dungeons--the abridgement of personal freedom in Continental
countries--the exercise of arbitrary power by irresponsible authority
in other lands--they would turn their eyes homeward, and examine the
treatment and the sufferings of their own political prisoners. I
would, in all sincerity, suggest that humane and well-meaning men,
who exert themselves for the remission of the death-penalty as a
mercy, would rather implore that the doors of solitary and silent
captivity should be remitted to the more merciful doom of an
immediate relief from suffering by immediate execution--the
opportunity of an immediate appeal from man's cruelty to God's
justice. I speak strongly on this point because I feel it deeply. I
speak not without example. At the Commission at which I was tried
there was tried also and sentenced a young man named Stowell. I well
remember that raw and dreary morning, the 12th March, when handcuffed
to Stowell I was sent from Kilmainham Prison to the County Gaol of
Kildare. I well remember our traversing, so handcuffed, from the town
of Sailing to the town of Naas, ancle deep in snow and mud, and I
recall now with pain our sad foreboding of that morning. These in
part have been fulfilled. Sunday after Sunday I saw poor Stowell at
chapel in Naas Gaol drooping and dying. One such Sunday--the 12th
May--passed and I saw him no more. On Wednesday, the 15th, he was, as
they say, _mercifully_ released from prison, but the fiat of mercy
had previously gone forth from a higher power--the political convict
simply reached his own home to die, with loving eyes watching by his
death-bed. On Sunday, the 19th May, he was consigned to another
prison home in Glasnevin Cemetery. May God have mercy on his
soul--may God forgive his persecutors--may God give peace and
patience to those who are doomed to follow.
"Pardon this digression, my lords, I could not avoid it. Returning to
the question, why sentence should not be pronounced upon me, I would
ask your lordships' attention to the fact showing, even in the
estimate of the crown, the case is not one for sentence.
"On the morning of my trial, and before the trial, terms were offered
to me by the crown. The direct proposition was made through my
solicitor, through the learned counsel who so ably defended me,
through the Governor of Kilmainham Prison--by all three--that if I
pleaded guilty to the indictment, I should get off with six months'
imprisonment. Knowing the pliancy of Dublin juries in political
cases, the offer was, doubtless, a tempting one. Valuing liberty, it
was almost resistless--in view of a possible penal servitude--but
having regard to principle, I spurned the compromise. I then gave
unhesitatingly, as I would now give, the answer, that not for a
reduction of the punishment to six hours would I surrender
faith--that I need never look, and could never look, wife or
children, friends or family, in the face if capable of such a selfish
cowardice. I could not to save myself imperil the safety of others--I
could not plead guilty to an indictment in which six others were
distinctly charged by name as co-conspirators with me--one of those
six since tried, convicted, and sentenced to death--I could not
consent to obtain my own pardon at their expense--furnish the crown
with a case in point for future convictions, and become, even though
indirectly, worthy to rank with that brazen battalion of venal
vagabonds, who have made the Holy Gospel of God the medium of barter
for their unholy gain, and obtained access to the inmost heart of
their selected victim only to coin its throbbing into the traitor's
gold and traffic on its very life-blood.
"Had I been charged simply with my own words and deeds I would have
no hesitation in making acknowledgement. I have nothing to repent
and nothing to conceal--nothing to retract and nothing to
countermand; but in the language of the learned Lord Chief Baron in
this case, I could not admit 'the preposterous idea of thinking by
deputy' any more than I could plead guilty to an indictment which
charge others with crime. Further, my lords, I could not acknowledge
culpability for the acts and words of others at a distance of three
thousand miles--others whom I had never seen, of whom I had never
heard, and with whom I never had had communication. I could not admit
that the demoniac atrocities, described as Fenian principles by the
constabulary-spy Talbot, ever had my sanction or approval or the
sanction or approval of any man in America.
"If, my lords, six months' imprisonment was the admeasurement of the
law officers of the crown as an adequate punishment for my alleged
offence--assuming that the court had jurisdiction to try and
punish--then, am I now entitled to my discharge independent of all
other grounds of discharge, for I have gone through seven months of
an imprisonment which could not be excelled by demon ingenuity in
horror and in hardship--in solitude, in silence and in suspense. Your
lordships will not only render further litigation necessary by
passing sentence for the perhaps high crime--but still the untried
crime--of refusing to yield obedience to the crown's proposition for
my self-abasement. You will not, I am sure, visit upon my rejection
of Mr. Anderson's delicate overture--you will not surely permit the
events occurring, unhappily occurring, since my trial to influence
your judgments. And do not, I implore you, accept as a truth,
influencing that judgement, Talbot's definition of the objects of
Feminism. Hear what Devany, the American informer, describes them to
be. 'The members,' he says, 'were _pledged by word of honour_ to
promote love and harmony amongst all classes of Irishmen and to
labour for the independence of Ireland.' Talbot says that in Ireland
'the members are _bound by oath_ to seize the property of the
country and murder all opposed to them.' Can any two principles be
more distinct from each other? Could there be a conspiracy for a
common object by such antagonistic means? To murder all opposed to
your principles may be an effectual way of producing unanimity, but
the quality of love and harmony engendered by such a patent process,
would be extremely equivocal. Mr. Talbot, for the purposes of his
evidence, must have borrowed a leaf from the History of the French
Revolution, and adopted as singularly telling and appropriate for
effect the saying attributed to Robespiere: 'Let us cut everybody's
throat but our own, and then we are sure to be masters.'
"No one in America, I venture to affirm, ever heard of such designs
in connexion with the Fenian Brotherhood. No one in America would
countenance such designs. Revolutionists are not ruffians or
rapparees. A judge from the bench at Cork, and a noble lord in his
place in parliament, bore testimony to that fact, in reference to the
late movement; and I ask you, my lords--I would ask the country from
this court--for the sake of the character of your countrymen--to
believe Devany's interpretation of Fenianism--tainted traitor though
he be--rather than believe that the kindly instincts of Irishmen, at
home and abroad--their generous impulses--their tender
sensibilities--all their human affections, in a word--could
degenerate into the attributes of the assassin, as stated by that
hog-in-armour, that crime-creating Constable Talbot.
"Taking other ground, my lords, I object to any sentence upon me. I
stand at this bar a declared citizen of the United States of America,
entitled to the protection of such citizenship; and I protest against
the right to pass any sentence in any British court for acts done, or
words spoken, or alleged to be done or spoken, on American soil,
within the shades of the American flag, and under the sanction of
American institutions. I protest against the assumption that would in
this country limit the right of thought, or control the liberty of
speech in an assemblage of American citizens in an American city. The
United States will, doubtless, respect and protect her neutrality
laws and observe the comity of nations, whatever they may mean in
practice, but I protest against the monstrous fiction--the
transparent fraud--that would seek in ninety years after the
evacuation of New York by the British to bring the people of New York
within the vision and venue of a British jury--that in ninety years
after the last British bayonet had glistened in an American sunlight,
after the last keel of the last of the English fleet ploughed its
last furrow in the Hudson or the Delaware--after ninety years of
republican independence--would seek to restore that city of New York
and its institutions to the dominion of the crown and government of
Great Britain. This is the meaning of it, and disguise it as you may,
so will it be interpreted beyond the Atlantic. Not that the people of
America care one jot whether S.J. Meany were hanged, drawn, and
quartered to-morrow, but that there is a great principle involved.
Personally, I am of no consequence; politically, I represent in this
court the adopted citizen of America--for, as the _New York Herald_,
referring to this case, observed, if the acts done in my regard are
justifiable, there is nothing to prevent the extension of the same
justice to any other adopted citizen of the States visiting Great
Britain. It is, therefore, in the injustice of the case the influence
lies, and not in the importance of the individual.
"Law is called 'the perfection of reason.' Is there not danger of its
being regarded as the very climax of absurdity if fictions of this
kind can be turned into realities on the mere caprice of power. As a
distinguished English journalist has suggested in reference to the
case, 'though the law may doubtless be satisfied by the majority in
the Court of Appeal, yet common sense and common law would be widely
antagonistic if sentence were to follow a judgment so obtained.'
"On all grounds then I submit, in conclusion, this is not a case for
sentence. Waving for the purpose the international objection, and
appealing to British practice itself, I say it is not a fair case for
sentence. The professed policy of that practice has ever been to give
the benefit of doubt to the prisoner. Judges in their charges to
juries have ever theorized on this principle, and surely judges
themselves will not refuse to give practical effect to the theory. If
ever there was a case which more than another was suggestive of
doubt, it is surely one in which so many judges have pronounced
against the legality of the trial and the validity of the conviction
on which you are about to pass sentence. Each of these judges, be it
remembered, held competent in his individuality to administer the
criminal law of the country--each of whom, in fact, in his
individuality does so administer it unchallenged and unquestioned.
"A sentence under such circumstances, be it for a long period or a
short would be wanting in the element of moral effect--the effect of
example--which could alone give it value, and which is professedly
the aim of all legal punishment. A sentence under such circumstances
would be far from reassuring to the public mind as to the
'certainties' of the law, and would fail to commend the approval or
win the respect of any man 'within the realm or without.' While to
the prisoner, to the sufferer in chief, it would only bring the
bitter, and certainly not the repentant feeling that he suffered in
the wrong--that he was the victim of an injustice based on an
inference which not even the tyrant's plea of necessity can
sustain--namely, that at a particular time he was at a distance of
three thousand miles from the place where he then actually stood in
bodily presence, and that at that distance he actually thought the
thoughts and acted the acts of men unknown to him even by name. It
will bring to the prisoner, I repeat, the feeling--the bitter
feeling--that he was condemned on an unindicted charge pressed
suddenly into the service, and for a constructive crime which some of
the best authorities in the law have declared not to be a crime
cognizable in any of your courts.
"Let the crown put forward any supposition they please--indulge in
what special pleadings they will--sugar over the bitter pill of
constructive conspiracy as they can--to this complexion must come the
triangular injustice of this case--the illegal and unconstitutional
kidnapping in England--the unfair and invalid trial and conviction in
Ireland for the alleged offence in another hemisphere and under
mother sovereignty. My lords, I have done."
* * * * *