Page:The Eureka Stockade.djvu/123

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113

LXXXVII.

VIRI PROBI, SPES MEA IN VOBIS; NAM FIDES NOSTRA IN DEO OPTIMO MAXIMO.

To be serious. I am a Catholic, born of an old Roman family, whose honour never was questioned; I hereby assert before God and man, that previous to my being under arrest at the Camp, I never had seen the face of 1, Gore, 2, Synnot, 3, Donnelly, 4, Concritt, 5, Dogherty, 6, Badcock, 7, Hagartey, and 8, Tully.

I challenge contradiction from any bona fide digger, who was present at the stockade during the massacre on the morning of December 3rd, 1854.

As a man of education and therefore a member of the Republic of Letters, I hereby express the hope that the Press throughout the whole of Australia will open their columns to any bona fide contradiction to my solemn assertions above. I cannot possibly say anything more on such a sad subject.




LXXXVIII.

SUNT LEGES: VIS ULTIMA LEX: TUNC AUT LIBERTAS AUT SERVITUDO; MORS EMIM BENEDICTA.

On the reassembling of the Court, at three o'clock, Mr. Ireland rose to address the Jury for the defence.

The learned Counsel spent a heap of dry yabber-yabber on the law of high-treason, to show its absurdity and how its interpretation had ever proved a vexation even to lawyers, then he tackled with some more tangible solids. The British law, the boast of urbis et orbis terrarum, delivered a traitor to be practised upon by a sanguinary Jack Ketch:—I., to hang the beggar until he be dead, dead, dead; II., then to chop the carcase in quarters; III., never mind the stench, each piece of the treacherous flesh must remain stuck up at the top of each gate of the