The  question  first  mooted  among  all  classes  was,
would  there  be  a  fair  trial  ?  A  fair  trial  in  a  political
case  was  a  phenomenon  which  Ireland  had  not  seen  in
the  memory  of  living  man.  In  State  prosecutions  the
law  was  wrested  to  the  interest  of  the  Crown  as
systematically  in  the  reign  of  Queen  Victoria  in  Ireland,
as  it  had  been  wrested  in  the  reign  of  Charles  I.  in


HOW  (yCONNELL  WAS  TEIED.  395

England.  The  jury  panels  and  the  jury  itself  it  was
feared  would  be  as  carefully  packed  for  a  conviction,  as
panels  and  juries  had  been  packed  in  Middlesex  under
the  Stuarts.  And  this  fear  was  not  confined  to  ignorant
or  prejudiced  persons.  Lord  Cloncurry,  a  Privy  Coun-
cillor, publicly  declared  that  up  to  the  time  of  O'Loghlen
and  Perrin  an  impartial  or  unpacked  jury  in  Crown
cases,  where  Catholics  were  concerned,  was  a  thing
quite  unknown.  And  "the  time  of  O'Loghlen  and
Perrin  "  was  just  half  a  dozen  years  before.  Mr.  Henry
Grattan  revived  in  the  public  memory  the  fact  that
when  Lord  Fingal  was  arrested  and  the  Catholic  dele-
gates tried  in  1811,  the  jury  panel,  produced  by  Mr.
