The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-09-10 00:00:00

TUESDAY 11101iAING, SEPT. 10, 1844.

The prison-doors are open. O'Connell and his
myrmidons are free—free to commence again their
insolent and injurious agitation—free to pour once
more into the ear of frantic millions those insidious
appeals, which have already wrought such fearful
alienation of feeling in the hearts of the Irish peo-
ple, towards British laws and the British name;
and which promise, at no distant day, to bring
about a struggle only to be quenched with blood—
a struggle whose issue must either desolate the soil
and destroy the prosperity of Ireland, or, in the
event of a dearly-earned success, strike a blow at
the power of the British empire, which all Europe,
aye the world in arms, have attempted in vain.
O'Connell is free. He stood yesterday in his
"Conciliation Hall "—with the words of conciliation
on his lips ? Oh, no : he stood there hurling
taunts, insults, threats against England and her
laws, whose weakness, whose merciful humanity,
have released him from his well-earned prison. He
stood, exulting in the added power of mischief,
which the very attempt to control his incendiary
career had conferred upon him, proclaiming new
sedition and new injuries to he attempted; and, by
the triumphant yells of approbation which followed
every word of insult to the Saxon poured from his
lips, he afforded to the Government and the people
of this empire a warning intimation of the days and
the scenes to come, for which it were well they
should prepare in time. Hatred to England—deep,
bitter, and abiding—was marked upon the faces,
and glared from the eyes, of the great majority of
that vast assembly, who listened to and cheered his
every word,—a hatred, the outbursting of which
England must prepare to encounter and put down,
if she would not be herself its victim.
Men are asking themselves, everywhere, "How
has this event been brought about How is this
man enabled from day to day to dare and evade the
powers of British law? What unaccountable agency
can have enabled him on this occasion,--when for
the first time in his turbulent career within the walls
of a British prison abiding the sentence of a British
jury,—to escape in defying and triumph to his
favourite agitation ?" They glance with distrust
towards the Conservative head of the British Go-
vernment—to the man who has once earned that
distrust, by concessions to the dictation of this very
demagogue. But the hands of Sir Robert Peel are,
this time, clean. He has not brought about a re-
sult so apparently inexplicable. The prerogative of
the Crown has not been exercised to bring it about;
and we are driven, therefore, to one or other of
these conclusions; viz.—either the law of England
is too feeble to put down treasonable conspiracy,
such as that of which O'Connell and his con-
federates were proved guilty, or that law has been
wrongfully administered. Let us see which of these
alternatives we are to adopt.
The legality in form, of the sentence by virtue of
which these conspirators were committed to a prison,
was agreed at length under a writ of error before
the House of Lords, the last court of appeal. It
was agreed before the whole House, mind, not the
" Law Lords" alone, of whom there were only five
present. Several issues were prepared upon points
raised by counsel and sent down for the opinion of
the judges of the courts below, seven of whom were
strongiy of opinion that the judgment of the Court
of Queen's Bench in Ireland must be affirmed ;
one (Baron Parke) was undecided, but leaned to-
wards a reversal, and Mr. Justice Coltman alone
was decisive in favour of such reversal. These
opinions were given to ,the House of Lords on
Monday last ; and there was scarcely a man in the
realm (out of the secret) who did not feel assured
that the decision of the House of Lords would be
in accordance with that of the majority of the
judges. But it appears to have been the practice—
the etiquette—of that House to leave the decision
of the dry matters of law usually submitted to them
to the "Law Lords" who had heard the case, (in
the present instance, consisting of the Lord Chan-
cellor Lyndhurst, and Lords Brougham, Denman,
Cottenham, rnd Campbell ;) and when Lord
Wharncliffe had impressed upon the House the
propriety of adhering to such practice, and leaving
the Law Lords alone to vote, the case was over, the
decision almost certain for whiggery. The Lord
Chancellor and Lord Brougham were for affirming
the judgment, Lords Denman, Cottenham, and
Campbell for reversing it; and as the result, O'Con-
nell and his confederates are at liberty. and the law
of England a mockery.
It must strike every impartial man that there is
something very anomalous and even absurd in the
course here gone upon. It is plainly one opposed
to common sense, to the spirit of the constitution,
and to the very existence of the House of Lords
(properly so called) as a court of appeal. The form
of the whole proceedings implied that the house was
to decide the question at issue, not the law lords
alone, or whence the necessity of taking the opinion
of the inferior judges. The law lords (superior
judges) did not want such opinions to guide them.
They went directly in their teeth after they had
them. Their minds, we have no doubt, were made
up long before they had them ; and they were, there-
fore, useless, unless, as we believe, they were in-
tended for the guidance of the whole house, lay lords
as well as law lords, who had the undoubted privilege,
and should have been left free to exercise the.
privilege of voting upon an occasion so important
as this,—of taking care that the majesty of British
law was not set at nought and justice defeated, by
the quibbles and the party leanings of political law-
yers. _ _

- We regret that the " old ways of the constitution"
were not adhered to,---that new-fangled etiquette
was so fatally preserved ; for we are perfectly satis-
fied not only by the result, but by the mode of its
attanment as well, that a deep injury has been in-
flicted upon this country and her institutions. For
what must be the necessary result of this untoward
decision. So far as the impression produced in Ire-
land is concerned we know what has been the effect.
It has destroyed, or fatally weakened, the character
of the judicial bench in that country. Already we
hear from the lips of the agitator himself threats of
impeachment directed against all the authorities who
were concerned in the sentence pronounced against
him. But a more disastrous effect is that which
must be produced throughout the empire, to the
disparagement of the whole course of our judicial
code, which is thus shewn to be arbitrary, utterly
incapable of being depended upon in its decisions,
and liable to be influenced as to those decisions by
party bias.l IFor a moment examine the authorities,
—their character and standing,—who have recorded
their opinions for and against the reversal of this
judgment. On the one side we have, for the rever-
salf Lord Cottenham, Lord Denman, Lord Camp-
bell, Baron Parke (dubious) and Justice Coltman,—
Eve in number; two of them, (Lords Cottenham and
Campbell,) place-hunting Whigs, and the latter a
violent and a needy partizan,—a man whose "greed"
of lucre, to use the expressive language of his own
country, was so conspicuously shown in his grasp-
ing the Chancellorship of Ireland at a time when the
Ministry to which he belonged was in extremis.
For confirming the judgment we have Lord Lynd-
hurst, Lord I3roughem, Chief Justices Tyndal and
Fennefather, and Judges Coleridge, Williams,
Maul; Pattison, Alderson Gurney, Burton, Cramp-
ton and Perrin.—in all, thirteen in number, against
five; and how far removed the bulk of them from
even the imputation of political partizanship ! How
unimpeachable in the dignified character of their
position !. No such decision as this, against
judicial
of authority so. evident,. can possibly have the
weight
respect of the reflecting. portion of the. empire, or be
regarded in any other light than that in which it is
regarded
by the ablest jurnal in Ireland, the Dublin
Evening Mail, as
"a political,
not a legal decision."
For the present we leave its further consideration,
with pain and heartfelt sorrow for the results which
it involves. We may return to it. There are, we
fear, circumstances in the background which time
alone can aid us in developing.

We have given, in another part of our paper, a
descriptive account of so much of the nature of
Captain Warner's inventions as we have been ena-
bled to gather, and to convey in the small space at