are in a state of destitution during the greater part of each year. How is it that in one of the most fertile countries in the world this should occur? But the Union is more a nullity on ecclesiastical grounds; for why should the great majority of the people of Ireland pay for the support of a religion which they do not believe to be true? The Union was carried by the most abominable corruption and bribery, by financial robbery on an extensive scale, which makes it the more heinous and oppressive; and the result is that Ireland is saddled with an unjust debt, her commerce is taken from her, her trade is destroyed, and a large number of her people are thus reduced to misery and distress.

On the 2nd of January last I called this the Repeal year, and I was laughed at for doing so. Are they laughing now? No; it is now my turn to laugh; and I will now say that in twelve months more we will have our own Parliament again on College Green. The Queen has the undoubted prerogative at any time to order her Ministers to issue writs, which, being signed by the Lord Chancellor, the Irish Parliament would at once be convened without the necessity of applying to the English Legislature to repeal what they appear to consider a valid Act of Union. And if Sugden would not sign the writ, an Irish Chancellor would soon be found who would do so. And if we have our Parliament again in Dublin, is there, I would ask, a coward amongst you who would not rather die than allow it to be taken away by an Act of Union? Let every man who would not allow the Act of Union to pass hold up his hand. When the Irish Parliament is again assembled, I will defy any power on earth to take it from us again. Your shouts are almost enough to call to life those who rest in the grave. I can almost fancy the spirits of the mighty dead hovering over you, and the ancient kings and chiefs of Ireland, from the clouds listening to the shouts sent up from Tara for Irish liberty. Your cheers will penetrate to the extremity of civilization. Our movement is the admiration of the world, for no other country can show so much force with so much propriety of conduct. No other country can show a people assembled for the highest national purposes that can actuate man; can show hundreds of thousands able in strength to carry any battle that ever was fought, and yet separating with the tranquillity of schoolboys. You have stood by me long-stand by me a little longer, and Ireland will be again a nation.

ERSKINE ON THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

I say without reserve, speaking merely in the abstract, and not meaning to decide upon the merits of Mr. Hastings's cause, that an impeachment for an error in judgment is contrary to the whole spirit of English criminal justice, which, though not binding on the House of Commons, ought to be a guide to its proceedings. I say that the extraordinary jurisdiction of impeachment ought never to be assumed to expose error, or to scourge misfortune, but to hold up a terrible example to corruption and willful abuse of authority, by extra legal pains.

Now, is it possible for any human being to believe that a man, having no other intention than to villify the House of Commons (as this information charges), should yet keep his mind thus fixed and settled as the needle to the pole, upon the serious merits of Mr. Hastings's defense, without ever straying into matter even questionable, except in the two or three selected parts out of two or three hundred pages? This is a forbearance which could not have existed if calumny and detraction had been the malignant objects which led him to the inquiry and publication. The whole fallacy, therefore, arises from holding up to view a few detached passages, and carefully concealing the general tenor of the book.

It now remains to remind you that another consideration has been strongly pressed upon you, and, no doubt, will be insisted on in reply. You will be told that the matters which I have been justifying as legal, and even meritorious, have therefore not been made the subject of complaint; and that whatever intrinsic merit parts of the book may be supposed or even admitted to possess, such merit can afford no justification to the selected passages, some of which, even with the context, carry the meaning charged by the information, and which are indecent animadversions on authority. To this I would answer (still protesting as I do against the application of any one of the innuendoes), that if you are firmly persuaded of the singleness and purity of the author's intentions, you are not bound to subject him to infamy, because, in the zealous career of a just and animated composition, he happens to have tripped with his pen into an intemperate expression in one or two instances of a long work. If this severe duty were binding on your consciences, the liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man could venture to write on any subject, however pure

his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at

the other.

From minds thus subdued by the terrors of punishment there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly compositions on the general nature of government, by the help of which the great commonwealths of mankind have founded their establishments; much less any of those useful applications of them to critical conjunctures by which, from time to time, our own Constitution, by the exertion of patriot citizens, has been brought back to its standard. Under such terrors, all the great lights of science and civilization must be extinguished; for men cannot communicate their free thoughts to one another with a lash held over their heads. It is the nature of everything that is great and useful, both in the animate and inanimate world, to be wild and irregular; and we must be contented to take them with the alloys which belong to them, or live without them. Genius breaks from the fetters of criticism; but its wanderings are sanctioned by its majesty and wisdom when it advances in its path. Subject it to the critic, and you tame it into dullness. Mighty rivers break down their banks in the winter, sweeping away to death the flocks which are fattened on the soil that they fertilize in the summer; the few may be saved by embankments from drowning, but the flock must perish of hunger. Tempests occasionally shake our dwellings and dissipate our commerce, but they scourge before them the lazy elements which, without them, would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to His creatures, must be taken just as she is; you might pare her down into bashful regularity, and shape her into a perfect model of severe, scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no longer; and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable justice which you had exchanged for the banners of Freedom.

Upon the principle on which the Attorney-General prays sentence upon my client - God have mercy upon us! Instead of standing before him in judgment with the hopes and consolations of Christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example. Holding up the great volume of our

lives in His hands, and regarding the general scope of them if He discovers benevolence, charity and good-will to man beating in the heart, where He alone can look; if He finds that our conduct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmities, has been in general well directed, His all-searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will His justice select them for punishment without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offenses to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen, believe me, this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the gospels of heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented it, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that, instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, checker the volume of the brightest and best spent life, His mercy will obscure them from the eye of His purity, and our repentance will blot them out forever.

- Lord Erskine.

THE MARTYRDOM OF JOAN OF ARC

At the time of Joan of Arc's appearance in history, France had become a province of England, the great city of Orleans had been for a year in a state of siege, the people were suffering incredible hardships, and the Dauphin, who had not yet been crowned, was about to give up the struggle in despair. The young peasant girl from Domrémy, who seemed the very embodiment of patriotic fervor, made her way to the court, rekindled the national pride, and proceeding to Orleans at the head of the French troops, raised the siege and entered in triumph. After other victories, she conducted the king to Rheims, where he was solemnly crowned. Then, feeling that her mission was ended, she begged to be allowed to return to her native village. But in vain. Her services were still demanded, and she was obliged to enter upon more than one military plan which she did not approve. Many misfortunes followed, till at last she was captured by the Burgundians, who basely surrendered her to the English.

Her trial was conducted by the Bishop of Beauvais, a Frenchman who was sold to English interests, and who hoped, by favor of the English leaders, to reach the highest preferment. From beginning to end the proceedings

were barbarously cruel and unjust. Finally, the innocent young Maid of Orleans was condemned as a witch, and sentenced to be burned at the stake.

On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the creation of air-currents. "Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet himself, "ten thousand men wept;" and of these ten thousand, the majority were political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition. What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier—who had sworn to throw a faggot on her scaffold suddenly to turn away, a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood? What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to his share in the tragedy? And if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life, as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her, and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. No; she did not, though one should rise from the dead to swear it.

Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold,thou upon a down bed. But for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and torturer have the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together into sleep; together both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists were gathering fast upon