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.

Mark you, all the forms--all the precautions--all the outward seeming of English law and liberty--are in these Irish courts.

The outside is just the same as in any court that meets in the Old Bailey; but it is all the mask and the drapery, behind which the real figures are the foregone verdict, the partisan judge--the prepared cell or constructed gallows.
In the regime of coercion which has just expired, the whole machinery was in motion.