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

to extinguish this fire. But this is a point on which we
dare not express all that we think and feel. The meet-
ing of Parliament is at hand, and when it assembles Sir
Robert Peel will be told, in language which it would be
perilous in us to use, what the Catholics of Ireland think
of this new and crowning act of injustice to themselves
and insult to their religion. In the meantime that Act
will be held as proving more conclusively than a score
of Mr. O'Connell's speeches, the necessity for repeal, and
will ,give the repeal cause a greater impulse than it
would have received from a dozen " monster " meetings.
POST.—It is impossible not to feel some degree of
indignation at the slovenliness with which even the
most important proceedings appear to be conducted in
Dublin. It is now acknowledged that a Mr. Magrath,
who acted as registrar to the Recorder of Dublin in the
process of classifying the names admitted be.fore the
Recorder as qualified to be upon the grand panel, ac-
cidentally dropped one of the sheets upon which the
names were written, and thus the panel was given to
the -Sheriff'without including those names. The mis-
sing sheet was found among some papers where it had
dropped, in the office of the Clerk of the Peace. Such
stupid, cumbrous slovenliness in transacting important
business is wholly inexcusable, and the persons who
have been guilty of this absurd caralessne,ie
ought to be punished. But it is a matter with
which the Crown prosecutors had no more to
do than the persons prosecuted, and every one
must see how urgent was the application of
the traversers' counsel to have the trial post-
poned on account of such an error. The Crown
officers had done their duty with respect to the panel
presented by the Sheriff. A list of twenty-four persons.
duly qualified to try the issue, had been regularly and
formally prepared. The Crown was not accountable,
nor were the accused, for the stupidity of omitting a
whole sheet of 11a14225 from the panel. Nor was there
even a popular ground of complaint, for it seems that
as to religion and politics the omitted persons were
numerically divided in the same proportion as the forty-
eight from which the twenty-four persons (out of whom
the jury must be formed) were selected by the parties
on either side. While, therefore, we fully concur in the
feeling of displeasure at the repeated blunders, of one
kind or another, which have appeared in the course of
these Crown prosecutions, we must say that as to this
last the Crown officers were perfectly blameless, and the
attempt to postpone the trial on account of it was merely
vexatious.
CHRONICLE.—Yesterday the Irish law officers were
to swear in their packed jury for the trial of Mr.
O'Connell and the other traversers. In a country which
numbers its Catholic inhabitants by thousands and its
Protestants by hundreds, where the administration of
justice depends, more than in any country in the world,
not only on its being impartial, but on its appearing so,
we can conceive nothing so dangerous, nothing so incon-
sistent with the spirit not only of the Jury Act, but of
the Jury Act in emancipated Ireland, as this most fatal
and rash resolve of her Majesty's Ministers to try a
political enemy by a jury of their own opinions. It is a
virtual admission of their unpopularity. It recognises
the isolated position in which they stand in reference
to the great majority of the Irish nation. It is a
blunder in tactics, and not only a blunder but a crime.
We cannot see how Lord Eliot can stoop to such
an abandonment of his reputed impartiality ; we
cannot understand how Sir Robert Peel can permit
his law officers to join issue with his Catholic Relief
Bill. It would have been far better for his reputation,
and the eventual character of his Government, to have
lost a hundred trials than to have negatived in practice
his own Emancipation Bill. To exclude the Catholics !
It is to repeal the union—it is to revive the oldest and
the worst of all the tyrannies that ever disgraced the
Governments of Great Britain—it is to pull back the car
of national advancement, and, for the sake of an Adminis-
tration, to jeopardise an empire. To exclude the Ca-
tholics ! Well, then, Fox and Pitt, Edmund Burke and
Canning, our Russells, and our Greys, have pleaded the
great cause of public liberty, after all, in vain. The
abominable and odious system which their genius and
their eloquence overthrew is again the order of the day.
Better, a thousand times better, have lost a hundred
trials. Welcome national reverses—welcome almost
national disgrace, rather than to have the apple of old
discord thrown again into the arena, and that, too, by
the hand of a Government which audaciously assumes to
itself the character of impartiality, and has been
trumpeted, in the silver tunes of self-esteem, as
uninfluenced by any considerations of a party cha-
racter incompatible with the well-being of the
country. The case, however, has come to this—that the
idol of the Irish nation, whether innocent er guilty, is to
be tried by the twelve men on the jury list most opposed
to the public conduct of that gentleman. If a foreigner
violates the law, he can place a moiety of foreigners on
the inquest by which he is tried. The humane princi-
ples of English law, and the manly justice of English
jurisprudence, have ever been a shield to the oppressed ;
but to try speculative opinions by the speculations of an
adverse party—to drag a political chief to a tribunal
where he sees no faces but those of political oppenents—
to invert the very axioms of fairness, and, from the im-
proved and softened usages of the times in which we
live, to run back with the breathless cowardice of bigotry
into the worst practices of the worst times, is a degrada-
tion and a fall which must he atoned fur by the loud and
retributive voice of public censure, and the reprobation
of every honourable and honest man. The course of
Government was clear. Having resolved upon their
fatal course, they ought to have given the accused
an impartial trial. They should have regulated the
challenge of the jurors by the ordinary principles of
public prosecution, whenever any personal objections-or
peculiarly pronounced opinions have existed. Parties
who were open to such objections, or had pronounced
such opinions,' might have been fairly challenged. But
what is true on one side, is true also on the other. If a
Repealer is not to try a Repealer, why should anti-
Repeaters only be unchallenged ? Why should Catho-
lics who are not Repeolers be struck -off ? Amongst the
Catholics struck off by the Crown there are at least four
who are not Repeaters. Surely in Dublin, as in an elec-
tion committee, there might be found a residuum of
twelve men who are not irreclaimably infected with
the rabies and leprosy of party. Before such a
tribunal the trial might have been a fair one :—due
weight would have been given to legal reasoning ;
the expositions of the Bench would have been listened
to ; matters would have been conducted with the
usual zeal and usual hope of parties deeply interested
in the issue; the country would have looked on, if not
with favour—for neutrality in such a social state as that
of Ireland finds little favour—still with a respectful and
decorous interest. If the verdict had gone for the Crown,
the great bulk of the nation—ay, even the Irish nation
—might have acquiesced; if for the traversers, the defect
would have been laid to the law itself, and a foundation
would have existed for an application to Parliament on
the part of those who hold the proceedings of last
autumn inconsistent with the safety of the country. The
Minister might have been defeated, but his impartiality
would not have been impugned. He might have gained
nothing in such an exposure to the public of the inhe-
rent vices of the Tory system, and the melancholy con-
sequences of Tory gorernmerit ; but he would have been
spared this last ignominy, this last humiliation, of not
venturing to meet a tribunal any one member of which
was a political opponent. Such would have been the
course of a prudent Government. Such, we believed,
from the cautious character of the Premier, and the
amiable tendencies of Lord Eliot, would have been the
course of the Peel Administration ; but they have
mounted the fatal car of Irish bigotry, which has de-
solated so many an epoch in the history of the sister
island, and which recently—we had hoped for ever—
had yielded to a nobler policy and a more Christian
civilization.

GLOBE.--:When the fact became known that every
Rothan Catholic name had been expunged from the
Dublin jury-list by the Crown agents, and the practical
injustice of such an extreme application of the prerogative
was pointed out, the objecti.ai was met by the Government
organs with an admission, that had the Roman Catholics so
struck out been excluded as Catholics, there would have
been grounds for impugning the act as invidious and un-
just. But it so happened, we are told, that the whole of the
eleven Catholics struck out of the list by the Crown agent
were Repeaters. They were 'ejected, not as Catholics,
but as Repealers. As on the trial of Chartist leaders
fur sedition or conspiracy, or any other offence, alleged
to have been committed by them in such relation, the
Crown would object to Chartists as unlit to exercise,
with the requisite impartiality, the functions of jury-
men in such a cause; su, it was, urged, Repealer.s were
properly excluded from the panel from which a jury
for the trial of the parties accused of conspiracy and
sedition, as Repeal leaders, was to be selected.
There was a show of reason in this mode of
stating the question. It. would have been difficult, if
not impossible, to overturn the argument, supposing the
assumption on which it was based to have been valid.
The whole case rested on the simple matter of fact—
were all the Roman Catholics who were drawn on
this jury, Repealers ? Every Catholic was struck off.
If any were rejected who were not Repealers, then it
followed that their rejection was in consequence of their
religious creed, and not of their political predilections.
The fact is now ascertained to have been—not as the
uescrupulous organs of the Government stated, but that
four of the Roman Catholics struck from the list by the
Crown agent were not Repealers, and never had any
connexion whatever with the repeal movement
Driven from this refuge of lies by the force of in-
contestable facts, the fiction they had invented—es a
temporary relief from the overwhelming odium which
the bigotry and injustice of the act had provoked—being;demolished, the ground is shifted. The exclusion of'
the Catholics, as such, is now boldly vindicated. Pro-
testant ascendancy in the jury-box is insolently vin-
dicated as essential to the attainment of a verdict of
which truth should be the element. The organs of the
party—which, in the country where the trial is to be
had, constitute so decided a minority—take heart, and
now impute to the Roman Catholics a destitution f all
peasantry
—the to moral obligation. Not merely the
—the labourers—the lowest of the Catholic population,
but the higher class of tradesmen, the first-class shop-
keepers, the merchants and gentry of the county of
the city of Dublin, are charged with the deep deprava-
tion of moral principle, and disregard of social ties,
which the crime of perjury involves ! Such is the foul '
charge which the Herahl—the now back-bone advocate
of all the Government says and does—imputes to the
Roman Catholics, as a body. The senseless calumnies,
creations of bigotry in its dotage, and of ascendancy tot-
tering to its fall—which the Eldons, Rodens, and the
Wethcrelle, with the smaller but not less virulent shoals
Of clamourers against Catholic Emancipation, urged as
reasons for 'excluding the Catholics from the common
rights of citizens--are again revived. A Roman Ca-
tholic will regard perjury as a meritorious act, if
the interests of hi.; religion are to be observed by
its commission. "If a single Catholic had been al-
lowed to remain on the reduced jury list in the trial now
pending between the Crown and O'Connell, that indi-
vidual "—so the Herald assures the country—" would
have received a significant Lint from his spiritual
rulers, that his soul's everlasting welfare depended
Ca ..116
.loyalty
..to. tie .Church important