The Attorney-General for Ireland, in his speech of Wednesday and
Thursday, brought a positively crushing indictment against the Land League, which, however, it is impossible to summarise, as much of the evidence consists of extracts from the United Irishman, a paper which quotes without reproof O'Donovan Rossa's advice to kill evicting landlords, and in which, Mr. Johnson said, Mr. Parnell holds 237 ten-pound shares, and Mr. Biggar 10. We wish, however, to record Mr. Johnson's statement that the juries at Cork which recently found verdicts of guilty were not packed. In one of them, the Catholics numbered 8 out of 12; in the second, the Protestants numbered 8; in another there was but one Protestant to 11 Catholics, while in a fourth there were 7 Protestants to 5 Catholics. Some jurors were challenged, but they were men who, as some of them admitted at a meeting of rejected jurors, were pledged not to carry out the law. One of them, with the full assent of the rest, declared that "he would not agree to robbery, even if it were legalised robbery," that "75 per cent. of all law in Ireland was unjust," and that he could, while sworn to be true and just, only say what he believed to be just and true. In other words, these jurors held their impressions about the Law to be more binding than their oaths to obey the law.
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