He drew a frightful picture of a suffering and poverty-enslaved tenantry, sinking fast into barbarism from hopelessness,--unhappily, no Irishman need depend upon his imagination for the sketch. He contrasted the hours of toil and sickness with the wanton spendthrift in his pleasures,--the gambler setting the fate of families on the die, reserving for his last hope the consolation that he might still betray those whom he had ruined, land that when he had dissipated the last shilling of his fortune, he still had the resource of putting his honor up to auction! "And who is there will deny that he did this?" cried O'Halloran. "Is there any man in the kingdom has not heard of his conduct in Parliament--that foul act of treachery which the justice of Heaven stigmatized by his ruin! How on the very night of the debate he was actually on his way to inflict the last wound upon his country, when the news came of his own overwhelming destruction! And, like as you have seen sometime in our unhappy land the hired informer transferred from the witness-table to the dock, this man stands now forth to answer for his own offences!
"It was full time that the rotten edifice of this feudalist gentry should fall; honor to you on whom the duty devolves to roll away the first stone!"
A slight movement in the crowd behind the bar disturbed the silence in which the Court listened to the speaker, and a murmur of disapprobation was heard, when a hand, stretched forth, threw a little slip of paper on the table before O'Halloran. It was addressed to him; and believing it came from the attorney in the cause, he paused to read it. Suddenly his features became of an ashy paleness, his lip trembled convulsively, and in a voice scarcely audible from emotion, he addressed the bench,--
"My Lords, I ask the protection of this Court. I implore your Lordships to see that an advocate, in the discharge of his duty, is not the mark of an assassin. I have just received this note--" He attempted to read it, but after a pause of a second or two, unable to utter a word, he handed the paper to the bench.
The judge perused the paper, and immediately whispered an order that the writer, or at least the bearer, of the note should be taken into custody.