we had traveled almost side by side, giving the world the best that was in
us, not without honor; and now our country had stamped us as felons and
was sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered in us a social and
moral menace to its own integrity and order, and had put upon us the
stigma of rats who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state and corrupt
its cargo. The end of it all was to be a penitentiary cell, and disgrace
forever, to us and to ours.

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When you kick a mongrel cur it lies
down on its back and holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred acts
quite otherwise; you may kill it, but you cannot conquer it. We would not
lie supine under the assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot be
inflicted from without,--it can only come to a man from within. And the
disgrace which is attempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned back
on those who attempted it; the men whom our country had deputed to handle
the machinery of law had blundered, and had convicted and condemned those
who had done no wrong. I had never felt or expressed anything stronger
than contempt for any particular persons actively concerned in our
indictment and trial--the pack that had snapped and snarled so busily at
our heels. Till the last I had believed that their purpose could not be
accomplished,--that the nation would awake to what was being done in the
nation's court, under sanction of the nation's laws. The public must at
last realize the moral impossibility that men who had all that is dearest
to men to lose, should throw it away for such motives as were ascribed to
us--ascribed, but, as we felt, not established. And when the public
realized that, thought I, they would perceive that the shame which the
incompetent handling of the legal machinery aimed to fix on us must
finally root itself not in us but in the public; since the world and
posterity, which, more for our names' sake than for our own, would note
what was being done, would not distinguish between the employee and the