The Sun.
London, England, 1844-01-17 00:00:00

crisis !" The inference is irresistible. The ingenuity of
man—the reckless impudence of the venal Heralds of
a Government which aspires to the bad eminence of
the Castlereaghs and Sidmouths of days we had fondly
hoped had passed away fur ever—cannot evade the
ignominy, nor silence the indignation, which the rejectidn
of honourable citizens as unfit to serve on a jury, be-
cause of their religious opinions, has produced. The
Government has branded the Roman Catholics with the
crime. of perjury by their acts ; the Govnerdnmtheenitr organs
have admitted the acts, their motives, a
part,be h
the
justification
t o
a nationthe y
in a
bly'hethfUe insult foul
creed which it professes, and to the clergy who minister
have
ets put most forthsen sensitive its
at its altars, will recoil upon the Government which has
dared to inflict the wrong. Public opinion, against
which no Government can long prevail, will speak out
its reprobation of a proceeding so fraught with danger to
the peace, because so pregnant with wrong to the people,
of Ireland. The suspiciously " dropped" sheets, contain-
ing the sixty-three names omitted from the revised jury
list, assumes a form vastly different from that it would
have borne but for the striking out the Roman Ca-
tholics from the panel. That which would have been
received as a blunder, is now looked upon as a fraudu-
lent abstraction. The more the list was reduced, the
less probability would there be of an inconvenient num-
ber of names pertaining to the proscribed creed
being drawn upon the ballot ; and consequently
the greater chance of the jury being exclusively
of the right sort. But what an onus has the Go-
vernment placed upon the jury, as packed by its
officers ! We scarcely know whether a conviction or an
acquittal of the parties charged will be the most da-
maging. An acquittal will be a popular triumph, which
will prostrate the Ministry in the dust, because obtained
in spite of its preconcerted schemes to force a convic-
tion; while a verdict of guilty against O'Connell and the
rest of the traversers,:will be deprived of all moral in-
fluence by the disreputable means which have been taken
to secure that result.
STANDARD.—At the aggregate meeting of Roman
Catholics, which was held in Dublin on Saturday last, the
Emancipation Bill was proclaimed a nullity, became the
law officer of the Crown had availed himself of the right
of challenge provided by the statute, to reject some 10 or
11 Roman Catholic Repealers from the panel; the attorney
for the traversers having challenged an equal number on
his part, apparently for no other reason in the world
than that they were Protestants and not Repealers ! It
would be idle to repeat the proofs we have already ad-
duced, that the conduct here complained of was not
only perfectly proper and legitimate, but that the Crown
Solicitor would have been guilty of a gross dereliction of
his duty had he acted otherwise. How, in the name of
common sense, was the panel to be reduced, if both parties
were not permitted to strike off the number required by
the law ? Was Mr. Keminis to reject the names of re-
spectable Protestants, with whose intelligence and up-
rightness he might happen to be acquainted, for the
purpose of retaining some ten or eleven persons, who were
not only Catholics but Repealers—men who had pledged
themselves deeply on the very question they were called
upon to try ; or was it expected of him that he should
leave the panel in the hands of Mr. Pierce Mahoney, in
order that he might challenge twelve Protestant jurors
with impunity. "But," says Mr. Thomas Wyse, "if
being a Repealer renders a man unfit to sit upon a jury,
why should not an anti-Repealer be deemed equally in-
eligible?" We will answer this inquiry by another. If
being a notorious burglar renders a wan unfit to'sit upon
a jury iinpanelled to try a gang of housebreakers,
why should not a person who has never committed the
crime of house-breaking, or shop-lifting, be considered
as equally disqualified ? Simply, because it would be a
mockery of justice to depute a man who is obnoxious to
punishment himself, to decide on the guilt or innocence of
a fellow criminal and, in all probability, an accomplice.
It constantly happens in this country that men
of the most irreproachable character are rejected from
a panel on the bare suspicion of being friendly to
the parties they are to try, but no one has ever regarded
their exclusion on such a ground as a stigma on their
credibility. If the Emancipation Bill be a mere nullity
because Roman Catholic Repealers are not permitted to
sit in judgment on each other, it is, we trust, long likely
to remain so. The argument of Mr. Ford, that
because Roman Catholic constituencies had occa-
sionally returned Protestant agitators instead of
representatives of their own religious persuasion, they
wereincapable of being influenced by religious preju-
dices, is hardly less absurd. A Protestant agitator is
often more useful in his vocation than a Roman Catholic
of the same political profession could be ; and this is
precisely the reason why such a man will fre-
quently secure a preference over a moderate and
conscientious Roman Catholic. Mr. Sheil's speech,
in which he did not overlook the 63 jurors acci-
dentaly omitted from the panel, affords a striking proof
that a Protestant representative is often selected, not
because he is a Protestant, but because he is the cham-
pion of Roman Catholic agitation, and only boasts of
his Protestantism when he desires to give value to his
attempts to degrade and calumniate it. Mr. Steele
is a Protestaot ; but who ever heard him give
the Church, or the community to which he
professes to belong, a good word ? Yet the head pacifi-
cator is, for obvious reasons, a greater favourite at the
Corn Exchange than many Roman Catholics of much
more exalted character and pretensions. In a feeble and
jijune speech, stuffed with the usual number of thrice-
refuted falsehoods, and presenting, in fact, a mere echo
of the groans of Mr. Pierce Mahoney on the latest of his
grievances, Mr. , O'Connell is silly enough to invite
a comparison of the probable treatment of Chartist
with that of Roman Catholic jurors. He has the
effrontery to declare his belief that Chartist jurors
would not be rejected in favour of men having
no avowed sympathy with the parties prosecuted, or
that if they were, they would not put up with such
an indignity. We have no doubt, did Chartists
often happen to be qualified to serve on special furies,
that they would be equally liable with Roman Catholics
to be rejected from the panel in cases in which they
would be called to sit in judgment on their brother
Chartists ; nor would they have reason, therefore,
to complain that any stigma had been imposed upon
them. Men of the slightest delicacy of feeling would
rejoice at being relieved from a position which, if they
meant honestly, must be a most painful one—
that of weighing the imputed offences which have
originated iii the very principles and prejudices by
which they themselves profess to be actuated. The pre-
text that the right of challenge has ever been regarded
in this country as conveying the slightest reflection on
the character of the party rejected, is notoriously un-
founded. Who that had the right to exercise such a
privilege, would hesitate, in the absence of a more serious
disqualification, to challenge a friend, or even an
avowed political sympathiser of his opponent, in Pre-
ference to rejecting hap-hazard some one who might be
much better qualified to deal impartially with the case ?
Such objections are made every day in British courts of
justice without giving rise to the shadow of a complaint
that the credibility of the parties so rejected is intended
to be impeached. The whole tenor of Mr. O'Connell's
speech is a gross insult to the Roman Catholic body; for
treating his figment as a fact, that so many as 35 Roman
Catholics were omitted from the panel, among the 63
of whose absence lie makes such bitter complaint, he
would, he tells us, "have beaten the Attorney-General
with his own weapons." In other words, he ex-
presses his conviction that had he been able to
secure the presence of but one Roman Catholic on'
the jury (for the proportion, even under the cir-
cumstances lie describes, could hardly have been
greater), he would have been secure of a triumph ! If
this be not a stigma on the body in whose praise he
is so fervent, we know not what is. For the rest,
the falsehoods he reiterated with so much volubi-
lity have been so frequently refuted that it would
be worse than absurd to travel over the same ground
again. Truth, instead of coming " mended from his
tongue," always requires a great deal of " mending"
after he has meddled with it. There is hardly a " fact,"
great or " little," indeed, to which he professes to refer
in his Saturday's salmagundi, which has not been either
wholly falsified, or grossly distorted to suit the purposes
of the moment.