Accordingly, on the 7th of the same month, a motion was made in the Irish House of Commons, for an address to the Lord Lieutenant, requesting the apprehension of Mathew Carey. He was arrested on the 11th, and on the 19th was taken before the House of Commons, when certain interrogatories were put to him, which he positively refused to answer, on the ground that he was arrested by the civil power, and being under prosecution for the supposed libel of the Premier, he was not amenable to another tribunal. He preferred charges against the Sergeant-at-Arms in whose custody he was. An exciting debate arose; the Sergeant-at-Arms was justified by a large majority, and Mr. Carey was committed to Newgate jail, Dublin, where he remained until the 14th of May, when Parliament having adjourned, he was liberated by the Lord Mayor. “During my stay there,” says Mr. Carey, “I had lived joyously—companies of gentlemen occasionally dining with me on the choicest luxuries the markets afforded.” Although thus freed from the clutches of Parliament, the criminal prosecution for libel of the Premier still stood suspended over his head. In the then inflamed state of the public mind it would have been impossible to procure a grand jury to find a true bill against him; but the attorney-general filed a bill _ex-officio_ which dispensed with the interposition of the grand jury. Mr. Carey’s means were, in a great measure, exhausted; and, dreading the consequences of the prosecution and a heavy fine and imprisonment, his friends thought it best for him to leave his native country; and, “accordingly, on the 7th of September, 1784,” he says, “when I had not reached my 25th year, my pen drove me a second time into exile.” He embarked on board the _America_, Captain Keiler, and landed in Philadelphia on the 1st of November. He was induced to select Philadelphia as his new home for the reason that he had seen notices of his examination before the Irish House of Commons in two Philadelphia papers. There his case was therefore known, and would probably make him friends. He had sold out his paper to his brother for £500, to be remitted as soon as practicable, and he landed in Philadelphia with about a dozen guineas in his pocket, without a relation or a friend, or even an acquaintance, except those of the _America_. A most unlooked for circumstance soon occurred which gave a new direction to his views and changed the course of his future life. A fellow passenger of his had brought letters of recommendation to General Washington, and having gone to Mount Vernon to deliver them, he there met the Marquis de Lafayette.