"In our relations at that moment a sensitive gentleman would have walked into a furnace rather than shelter himself from reproach behind me. But you took the benefit of the fable; and I, for my part, left you your miserable triumph rather than distract the Confederation by an exposure.[1]
Mr. Mitchel's gravest charge in his "Jail Journal" is that I lowered the National cause by producing Father Mathew, Dr. Blake, and other witnesses to speak of my past career, and by allowing Meagher to prove that a letter bearing his signature was inserted in the Nation during my absence. This was my reply:—
"And now, sir, let us consider your charges on their merits.
"The first amounts to this: That I was guilty of crime and cowardice in producing witnesses to character, and permitting it to be proved that certain of the articles in the indictment were not written by me.
"Before defending that course, I wish to inquire how it comes you selected me for reprobation on this score? I was the last tried of the State prisoners: six months after Martin—five months after O'Brien and Meagher—four months after O'Doherty and Williams and that which you charge as crime upon me, every soul of them did months before me. Mark, there is not a single feature of my defence which was not anticipated by the prisoners you left behind you in Van Diemen's Land, or rejoined in America. And there is not one of them but what was tried and convicted long before my first jury was sworn.
"The earliest tried was John Martin. In your 'Jail Journal' you described him as your main reliance for revolutionary vigour in Ireland; others you pronounced 'not sufficiently desperate; your chief trust was in Martin and Reilly.' …
- ↑ These are the terms in which Mr. Mitchel wrote in the Nation of the Chartists before his conversion to Jacobinism—"We have received a printed address from the Chartists of England to the Irish people, with a request that we should insert it in the Nation. We desire no fraternisation between the Irish people and the Chartists not on account of the bugbear of 'physical force,' but simply because some of their five points are to us an abomination, and the whole spirit and tone of their proceedings, though well enough for England, are so essentially English that their adoption in Ireland would neither be probable nor at all desirable. Between us and them there is a gulf fixed; we desire not to bridge it over, but to make it wider and deeper."
