He had addressed his followers in Francis Street, setting his face against useless bloodshed, and made for the mountains hard by, commanding those who retained any sense of discipline to go along with him. A quick retreat was the only sagacious course to follow in this gross witless turmoil, so contrary to his purpose: for his printed manifesto had expressly declared life and property were to be held sacred. His secret, up to this point, was practically safe, and his losses reparable. The “rebels” abroad that night were but diabolical changelings; he would break away with the few he could rely upon, nurse hope to life with the courage that never failed, and take his chances to fight again. He reached safety, unchallenged; Dwyer even then implored for leave to call out on the morrow his disappointed veterans for a new assay; but Emmet was firm. No lust of revenge on fate, no recoil from being thought, for one hot moment, a coward, could shake him from his shrewd and rational acceptance of present defeat. He had no personal ambition, no vicarious tax to pay it. Ireland could wait the truer hour. He seems never once to have bewailed aloud the miserable end of his own long minute study of military strategy, the foul check to aspirations founded in honour, and breathed upon by the dead of Salamis and Thermopylæ. It is an almost incredible fact that the authorities, meanwhile, whether aware or unaware of the projected outbreak, were virtually off their guard, and the garrison was so little in condition to repel an onset that not a ball in the arsenal would fit the artillery! Public attention in Great Britain was fixed on the difficulties with France, and this preoccupation everywhere affected social life. Dublin had been almost deserted on July 23; the Castle gates stood wide open, without sentries. Two entire hours passed before the detachments of horse and foot arrived to clear the streets. “Government escaped by a sort of miracle,” as _The Nation_ remarked half a century after, “by a series of accidents and mistakes no human sagacity could have foreseen, and no skill repair.” Though there was treachery behind and before as we now see, Emmet, mournfully closing his summary of events, took no account of it. “Had I another week [of privacy], had I one thousand pounds, had I one thousand men, I would have feared nothing. There was redundancy enough in any one part to have made up in completeness for deficiency in the rest. But there was failure in all: plan, preparation, and men.” Three days after the abortive rising, the disturbance was completely over and the country everywhere quiet. The whole number of the slain was under fifty.