But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids above the voiceless desert, or the mountain peaks above the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Old John Brown of Osawatomie. Victor Hugo said: The punishment of John Brown may consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American Democracy. You preserve your shame but you kill your glory. Similar exhibits, in the hyperbolical optimism that constitutes this promotion by wind, might be added hereto indefinitely; for the output of such fantastical flights was limited only by the boundaries of taste and imagination. Probably the best things have been said. But that does not wholly discourage the later generations. Emulation in the phrase making competition still places a premium upon inconsistency. Mr. Villard said fifty years after: In Virginia, John Brown atoned for Pottawatomie by the nobility of his philosophy and his sublime devotion to principle, even on the gallows. Perhaps nowhere else than in the peculiar philosophy of those who attribute virtue to Brown as a motive for vice, may we find nobility in dissimulation; atonement without reconciliation; and the sublimity of devotion to principle in the denial of the truth. Awaiting death in the Charlestown jail, Brown denied that he had been a party to the murders and the robberies on the Pottawatomie; and went from the gallows into the presence of the Almighty to answer for both his participation in that horror and for his repeated denials of having been personally concerned in it.[497] December 10, 1911, Mr. Clyde McGee, of Chicago, said, among many other worked-over things: It grew upon him as he prayed, for John Brown was a man who talked with God as confidently as a friend speaketh with friend.[498] When Brown and his sons planned, during March and April and May, 1856, to steal Doyle's, and Wilkinson's, and other settlers' horses and leave the country; they planned, as a precautionary measure, to first make widows and orphans of the wives and children of these men, and then to steal the horses; not from the dead men, but from the weeping women and helpless children. Who think you talked with Brown and his swaggering sons as "friend speaketh with friend" during the time their plans were being made for these assassinations and robberies, and while they executed them: The Almighty, or the Devil? Brown was not sure who it was that prompted him to incite the slaves to strike for their liberty, by assassinating their masters. He answered Mr. Vallandigham at Harper's Ferry: No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the Devil; whichever you please to ascribe it to. I acknowledge no master in human form.[499]