THE trials for high treason have just closed the special commission at Clonmel has been adjourned to the 5th of December, at which time, if it be resumed, it will be but for the trial of some few misguided countrymen who were taken in arms in the late abortive insurrection. The advanced period of the month at which these proceedings terminated, leaves us no time for entering on the vast field of commentary which the trials themselves, the incidents connected with them, and the traitorous purposes which they disclosed, would naturally present to us. In a very few hours these pages must be in the press, and we can only avail ourselves of the present opportunity to glance at some few of the most prominent considerations which these all-important proceedings suggest.

In the first place, then, we cannot but express our heartfelt satisfaction, and in this we are convinced that we have the concurrence of every rightminded and loyal subject of the realm, that these trials have resulted in the entire vindication of the law. The language of defiance is heard no longer; earnest entreaty and respectful supplication is now substituted in the place of insolent and audacious menace. But a few months ago, one of the rebel leaders wrote thus to her Majesty's representative in this country:

"Whichever field of battle you prefer the Queen's Bench, or the streets and fields; whichsoever weapon-packed juries or whetted sabres; 1 trust, I believe, you will now be stoutly met. One party or the other must absolutely yield: you must put us down, or we will put you down."

This was the language of Mr. Mitchel in March last, and he is now undergoing the well-merited penalty for his crimes in Bermuda-the leaders with whom he was associated are lying under the heaviest sentence of that law which was so defied, and the followers who were goaded on by their vile counsel to array themselves for battle,

in the city or in the field, have been utterly broken up; and this, thank God, with but comparatively little amount of human suffering, not more than about twenty of the unhappy peasantry having to lay the loss of their lives to this wicked attempt at insurrection, and some few hundreds undergoing a temporary imprisonment under the extraordinary powers with which it became necessary to invest the Lord Lieutenant. From our hearts we rejoice at this result, and feel it to be matter of most devout gratitude. We feel that in the midst of all the horrors with which Europe has been devastated the carnage which has polluted her fairest cities-the savage barbarity which has deformed her population the bankruptcy and ruin which has invaded every class-and all the wild commotion and unbridled passion which universal anarchy has 'diffused, these countries have been preserved, we may say, unscathed, and that we have got a fresh assurance of a long continuance of that well-regulated liberty which no other country of the world enjoys in so great a degree, and which no other state of things could so effectually

secure to us.

We cannot but feel that it is among the very worst consequences of party connexions that some persons are found almost to lament the issue of these trials, because they have been conducted by a Whig government. A more melancholy feature in the history of faction could not well be disclosed. We will not be suspected of any partiality towards the present ministry, whose tampering with sedition and truckling to intimidation we have never ceased to denounce. Had it not been for the encouragement which they ever extended to the late Mr. O'Connell, the patronage with which they invested him, and the honours which they conferred on him in return for his parliamentary support while he still continued his seditious career, we would not now be writing on state trials, nor would we be living under a suspended habeas corpus. If it be

true that every danger is most successfully encountered when encountered manfully and resolutely, it is emphatically so of sedition. Check this agitation at once, when it assumes the aspect of sedition, and the evil is crushed in the bud; but truckle to it, or foster it by extorted concessions, and it extends with increasing rapidity over the whole society, and becomes uncontrollable. Yet such has ever been the course of the present ministers down to within the last few months, when the necessity for a contrary course was forced upon them— when they would themselves have been traitors to the Queen and Constitution had they faltered but an instant: and we cannot hesitate to say that by their ill-conceived and unstatesmanlike policy, they have been the primary, though the unintentional authors of all the evils that have arisen. But though this be so, is it not unreasonable and senseless in the highest degree to treat the deeply-laid and wellmatured schemes for a revolution in Ireland as a question at issue between the rebels and the cabinet ministers? Whose property was at stake when Mr. Smith O'Brien declared that the estates of such of the Irish gentry as did not side with the people should be confiscated, and transferred to the national exchequer? a declaration which his letter to the Mining Company showed to be no empty threat. Whose life was at stake when Mr. Meagher declared that if Irish nationality were refused by the crown when demanded by a deputation from the parish delegates of Ireland, "then up with the barricades, and invoke the god of battles;" or when Mr. Mitchel taught his readers that "the plainest path to liberty was the path of a rifle bullet on point blank to your enemy's heart;" or when Mr. Duffy, in the Nation, reminded the servant-men of Dublin, that they should be organised, "as they had the keys and the arms of the citadel." Was it the person or the property of Lord John Russell that was imperilled by these atrocious doctrines?-No; it was our own pro perties and lives the properties and lives of the well-affected and the loyal, of every denomination, in this island, but chiefly of the Protestant popula tion, as being, before all others, the mainstay of order, and of the British connexion. This was the stake that

was at hazard. The choice was offered us, either to yield to terrorism, to forswear our allegiance, to renounce the advantages of British connexion, and submit to the self-constituted directors of the country, or to yield our properties to confiscation, and expose our persons to the pikes, vitriol, and rifle bullets, with which it was sought to intimidate us. It was to us-to every loyal Irishman-and not to the Whig ministry, that this alternative was presented; it is from this that we have escaped by the recent vindication of the law; it is our own security, not a Whig triumph (if such it can be called), that we rejoice at; and we confess that our satisfaction at being rescued from the revolutionary vortex is so great, that we could well afford to accord to our political opponents any credit that they may claim for the suppression of a rebellion which their own pernicious policy materially contributed to produce.

We cannot, moreover, but deem it most fortunate, that the ordinary tribunals of the country were found sufficient to deal with the traitors and their treason. The English press, both Liberal and Conservative, was crying out for the introduction of martial law; the former on the plea that the guilty would otherwise escape, the latter from fear that, in straining to procure a conviction, the adminis tration of justice would be brought into contempt. Of these two evils the latter would be incomparably the greater.

"It is infinitely better," says Lord Eldon, in prosecuting Horne Tooke, "for the liberties and the security of the country that, in cases which juries may think doubtful, five thousand men should be acquitted, all men knowing that if they engage in certain schemes to certain extents, they are liable to be tried, and have a verdict of guilty, or not guilty, passed upon them, than that one man, about whose case any twelve men have a fair doubt, at the conclusion should be found guilty, and the misery of finding him guilty under that doubt remains upon their minds."

But we confess that we can hardly suppose it possible but that the tribu nals of the country would fall, and deservedly so, into the very greatest contempt, if they were thus, by delegating their jurisdiction, to confess their

inability to take cognizance of the highest crimes known to the law; neither would we venture in a case of treason, to deprive the prisoner of the advantage of those forms of procedure, and those established rules of evidence, which the wisdom of the law has prescribed for his protection from arbitrary power, and for securing the due administration of justice. We cannot conceive anything more dangerously unconstitutional than the doctrine, that in a case of high treason the authority of the supreme criminal court should lapse, and that an arbitrary irresponsible tribunal should usurp its functions. When a fierce insurrection is raging in a country when the authority of the civil magistrate is forcibly paralysedwhen the exigencies of the instant require terror to be struck into the disaffected, by the promptness and certainty of punishment then, indeed, and not until then, may the military tribunals be appealed to; resort to them can only be justified by the necessity of the case, by a necessity so imperious as to leave no choice between them and anarchybetween a military tribunal, and no ribunal at all; but to introduce it in othercases would be sheer tyranny.

Of the proceedings themselves at Clonmel it is now our duty to speak; briefly, indeed, as our time and space will alone admit of. These trials have now become memorable in history, and the part which was taken by the several actors in them will be canvassed and discussed when the writer and reader of these pages will have long passed from this troubled scene. Of the learned judges who presided at this commission, it is impossible not to speak highly. The eminent functionary who presided, the Lord Chief Justice, displayed throughout the whole of those proceedings, that matchless judicial ability, that clearness of judgment and steadfast resolution, for which he is so eminently characterised; and he was most ably supported by his learned colleagues: nothing could be clearer than their lordships' several charges; and, so far as our judgment extends, nothing could be sounder than the various decisons which, from time to time, they were called upon to pronounce. We are satisfied that every point, which was raised on behalf of the prisoners, received from their

lordships a calm, anxious, and dispassionate consideration; and we have already said that, to the best of our judgment, all such questions were rightly determined. At the same time, we cannot conceal from ourselves that there was wanting that perfect absence of any indication of bias, which is indispensable to complete the judicial character. We would, perhaps, have said, that in times of such high political excitement, this was too much to expect from any man; but that we remember having seen it so beautifully illustrated in that eminent judge, Baron Pennefather, in the trial of O'Dogherty, at the last commission in Dublin: we may say, however, that it falls to the lot of but few indeed. Judges are but men; and by their office and their station, their strongest prejudices and their nearest interests are enlisted in the cause of order. The guilt, moreover, of the leaders of an open insurrection is always unavoidably known to every one before they are put on their trial where it is to be legally established; so that it is not to be wondered at, although it were much to be desired that it had been otherwise, that not only the demeanor of the learned judges at the late trials, but their charges to the juries, too plainly evinced the foregone conclusion of guilt which they had arrived at in their own minds. Of a corrupt judgment, of an unjust charge, any one of these eminent judges is utterly incapable; but this unconscious or uncontrolled indication of bias towards the crown (or rather towards the public at large, which is represented by the crown), and against the prisoner, may possibly disspirit a prisoner's counsel (with Whiteside and Butt this was of course impossible); but it must certainly influence a jury. The charge of the Lord Chief Justice, in Mr. Meagher's case, is in this respect peculiarly objectionable-it is emphatically the speech of a crown counsel.

Our

space does not admit of our exemplifying this by passages from the charge, nor indeed would it be easy to do so, without quoting the entire. We do not complain of a single misstatement of fact, nor of the slightest strained inference, beyond what the law allowed; of this the distinguished judge is wholly incapable; neither do we complain of a single misapplication of any

principle of law; but we do say, that it is impossible to read that speech through, without feeling convinced that it is framed with the most consummate skill, so as to put the case in the most damaging point of view against the prisoner; that the learned judge, with that self-reliance for which he is so remarkable, being himself entirely convinced of the prisoner's guilt, was determined to enforce the same conviction on the jury, and that by doing so, he gave good grounds for the temperate rebuke which was made by Mr. Meagher, namely, that he did not put the case to the jury indifferently and impartially, as between the crown and the subject. It is with pain that we feel ourselves constrained to make these strictures on the charge of the learned judge; but it is beyond all things necessary to the due administration of justice, that judges be not suffered indirectly to invade the province of the jury; and it is an invasion of the rights and responsibilities of the jury, when the judge is anything but indifferent between the crown (or, as we said before, the public at large) and the pri

soner.

We must however, guard against being supposed to cavil with the finding of the jury in Mr. Meagher's case, as some persons have done. On the contrary, taking the doctrine of constructive treason to be now settled

law, Mr. Meagher was as clearly guilty as Mr. O'Brien or Mr. M'Manus. Mr. Meagher was indicted for levying war at Killenaule, Mullinahone, Farrinrory, and Ballingarry. That war was levied at these places by Mr. O'Brien is beyond the possibility of a doubt; but Mr. Meagher was not proved to have been at any of these places, and the attorney-general was obliged to sustain his case by proving an incitement and conspiracy on the part of Mr. Meagher to the levying of war; for as in treason there are no accessories, the inducement to commit any act of treason, which act is afterwards committed, makes the person exciting to such act a principal. If Mr. O'Brien had been concerned in any ordinary felony, Mr. Meagher would have been regarded by the law as an accessory before the fact; but in treason, such inducement renders him a principal. Such has long been the known and settled law. To con

vict Mr. Meagher, then, of contemplating an insurrectionary movement, of exciting to it, and of aiding in it, several speeches were given in evidence against him-one in March, to the members of the Confederation, in which he spoke of many of the European states having seized their rights with armed hands, and "beside them we ambition to take our place;" another delivered on his return from congratulating the French republic, on presenting to the Confederation the flag which he brought from Paris; and the third, after the conviction of Mitchel, when he declared that it had been his determination to have rescued him by the agency of the clubs, and apologizes for having altered his purpose, on the grounds that they were not sufficiently prepared to encounter the force that would be opposed to them, and that such a procedure would bring ruin on their cause. His speeches throughout the country, inciting to insurrection, in company with Mr. O'Brien, up to the day previous to the actual levying of war, were also given in evidence against him. He is proved to have been in the company of Mr. O'Brien, and to have travelled with him, after the affair of Killenaule ; and Mr. Lamphiere, a most respect able witness, proved that the parties agreed to separate in order to raise the flame in different parts of the country; and it is further proved that forthwith they did separate. We pass over altogether the evidence of Dobbin, the spy, as from its many inaccuracies it is not likely that the jury attached much weight to it; but upon those established facts it was then for the jury to determine, whether Mr. Meagher's absence from Ballingarry was in consequence of his abandonment of the traitorous project with which he was connected, and which he had so far promoted-if so, he would be entitled to their acquittal. Is it possible, on reading those speeches and taking those unquestioned facts, to hesitate for one instant in concurring in the verdict? It is a misapprehension to call this bit-by-bit evidence cumulative treason-a doctrine which is justly condemned, and which has been long exploded-a doctrine which was encountered in Archbishop Laud's trial, by the question, "whether two hundred black rabbits could ever make one black horse?" No; it is cumu