Palatial mansions are windowless, grimy,
hideous--with all the ghastly surroundings of tenement homes of the very
poor.
It is in Green Street Court-House that the political offenders in
Ireland are tried. Within its narrow and grimy walls I saw many a
gallant Irishman, when I was a young reporter, pass through a foregone
and prearranged trial to torture, agony, madness, premature death. I
can only think of it as of a shambles, or, perhaps, to put it more
strongly, but more accurately, as I think of that wooden framework in
which I saw the murderer, Henry Wainwright, hanged by the neck one foggy
morning years ago, a gallows. The jury was packed, and the judges on the
bench were as much a part of the machinery of prosecution as the Counsel
for the Crown. The whole thing was a ghastly farce--as ghastly as the
private enquiries that intervene between the Russian rebel and the
hunger, and solitude, and death of the fortress of St. Peter and St.
Paul, or the march to Siberia.
[Sidenote: The lawyer and the hangman.]
In all such squalid tragedies, men of the Carson type are a necessary
portion of the machinery, as necessary as the informer that betrays--as
the warder who locks the door--as the hangman who coils the rope.
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