The great Irish lawyer Dan O'Connell was charged with conspiracy in his career, and this is an excerpt from his summation in his own case. The entire strength of this prosecution consists in that cabalistic word, 'conspiracy.' Members of the jury, I know that I have but a short time to labor in my vocation here, and that there is an eternity on which I must soon enter. I approach that judgment which cannot be long postponed, and do you believe that under such circumstances I would be guilty of that with which I stand charged? Ah, no, you do not think I would have the cruelty, the folly, the absurdity to enter into such a conspiracy. Put your hands to your hearts and say you believe it. I am sure you do not. Pardon me if I have made too free, but I will say there is not one of you can spell a conspiracy out of all that was laid before you during the eleven hours -- eleven hours -- during which the Attorney-General was ringing changes on that word, going backwards and forwards, from meeting to meeting, and from policeman to policeman, in colored clothes and out of colored clothes, in pantaloons and petticoats -- not one of you can believe that any such conspiracy ever existed. I proclaim, firmly, you cannot believe it. Perhaps what the Attorney-General wants you to believe is, that I was a conspirator without knowing it -- that I fell into a conspiracy as a man tumbles into a pit -- without knowing it was there. No! This was in open day, all that I have done and said. I saw the pitfall. In the technicality of the law, I could say that I could not be convicted because I had no guilty knowledge, but I scorn to make points of law. I want your verdict as a matter of your own common sense. Oh, this is a serious invention -- this sweeping conspiracy of the Attorney-General! It has been so powerfully put to you already that I will not repeat it at any length: There would be an end to every great movement for the amelioration of human institutions if you were to consent to the Attorney-General's theory of conspiracy. This theory, born on English soil, has in Ireland been shaped by malign hands into a creature so monstrous and vile that its own parents should put it away. Oh yes, some august persons first conceived the idea of punishing people for their words and thoughts, and now you are to be put as it were into a sleep with this incubus -- this imaginary conspiracy -- resting on your consciences and minds. But one of your number may say, what has this to do with me? I share neither politics, nor allegiance, nor faith with this chap O'Connell. He takes every opportunity to rail against the privileges of those loyal to the English crown. Let him rot in a prison for his damned conspiracy. Well, I will put to that person a case. Surely you share with me the knowledge that human slavery is an abomination against God and nature. How was slavery abolished in England and her colonies? Would not the abolition movement -- which used the same tactics that have here in Ireland propelled me into the dock -- have been set back a decade or more, if the Attorney General's doctrine of conspiracy had been brought to bear against its leaders? The advocates of abolition had their public meetings, their private meetings, their monster meetings. They published the guilt of the slave-owners. They made themselves bitter, unrelenting enemies by so doing. Oh, how people would have stared if this doctrine of conspiracy that the Attorney-General is offering today was sooner invented, and the slave bound forever, till somebody with milk and water accents -- with mild tea-table talk endeavored to persuade some one to abolish it, until some one went to America and spoke soft things to the owners of the slaves, and having, in as gentle a way as possible, insinuated the atrocities practiced towards the slaves, then, by and by to coax the owners, and win their consent to the abolition of slavery. I care not though the gloom of a prison should close upon me, my heart rewards me with the consideration that humble, ungifted, and undistinguished as I am, I had the honor to belong to that conspiracy by which the slave trade was abolished in England, and -- by the grace of God and the courage of men -- will someday be abolished in America.