Excerpt from Fitz John Porter
Vicarious stirring commends itself to all but the sufferer. It has a peculiar charm for those who most ignore the precepts of its grand exemplar. Romans enjoyed it in the amphitheatre, Spaniards at the bull-fight, Englishmen in so-called courts of justice. The mirror of Anglo-Saxon equity shows, beneath its brilliant surface, dark specks of Anglo-Saxon brutality. Macaulay in his over-colored portrait of the Puritans - by no means the worst front of British character - kept nearer exact truth than usual, in saying that they denounced bear-baiting, not for the pain inflicted upon the bears, but because of the pleasure it gave the people. Cowardice, rare there as here, is always found hand in hand with cruelty. They hunt in couples.
Admiral Byng was shot - a court-martial the convenient instrument - that an administration might not be unseated.
When the local rulers of Ireland, stimulated to frenzy in 1798, by their panic-stricken superiors, simplified their criminal code, cheapening blood, one of their first victims was William Orr, charged with administering the oath of the United Irishmen to a British soldier, sent to him by the agents of the government, for the purpose of taking that oath, and so qualifying himself as a witness. The oath was not, in itself, a hanging matter. The terrified officials would, to avoid the nightmare which infested the castle, have swallowed many such. It had been eagerly taken by more than a quarter of a million of men, in Ulster alone Presbyterians demanding equal rights for their Roman Catholic countryman. Orr, set apart for the gallows, was convicted and condemned. Four jurors voluntarily made oath that they had no recollection of assenting to the verdict, and that if they had done so, it must have been when, stupified with whiskey, brought into the jury room by stealth, they were unable to express their dissent. This exposure of official machinery brought a reprieve. The affidavit of the witness, whose testimony procured conviction, that his conclusive proofs had been a sequence and succession of perjuries, induced further delay. In Great Britain those affidavits would have given pause. In Ireland it was not so. Examples were needed. The expense of a vexatious trial had been incurred, and loyal servants of the crown demanded compensation for wear and tear of conscience and temper.
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