Here then was the foundation of all the attacks made upon the unhappy General; but was there not something behind,--something _below_ this foundation? The extraordinary case of Dr. Follen, who was hunted from pillar to post, year after year, and wellnigh lied into his grave, shows what may be done by conspirators and spies and slanderers, when a respectable man grows obnoxious to a foreign power. If he is at all headstrong or imprudent, nothing can save him. Oddly enough, it happens that one of the very papers which followed Dr. Follen whithersoever he went, like a sleuth-hound,--the Philadelphia Gazette,--was among the bitterest and most unrelenting, of those that assailed General Bratish. While pursuing these investigations, I learned from what I regarded as high authority, that General Bratish had presented an address to Lord Normanby, at the head of the whole consular body, having been chosen for that special purpose; and I was referred to the Irish Royal Cork Almanac for 1835, where, under the head of Foreign Consuls, I read, "Colonel John Bratish (d'Elias) Eliovich, K. C. C., S. S., L. H., Consul-General of Greece, Mexico, Buenos Ayres, and Switzerland, Consular Agent of Turkey." How were these contradictions to be reconciled,--the facts proved with the stories told? If General Bratish was the swindler and impostor they pretended, the sooner he was exposed, and the more publicly, the better. On the contrary, if he was an honest man--a man greatly wronged and belied, like Dr. Follen--he ought to be defended,--but how? He was poor and friendless, and the whole newspaper press of the country was either against him, or wholly indifferent. Had he been on trial in a court of justice, any lawyer would have defended him,--nay, for that matter, he might have defended himself. But if he entered the field as a writer, alone against a host, volumes would have to be written,--and who would publish them,--who read them? That I might bring the matter to issue at once, knowing well, and from long experience, that, when people are accused through the newspaper press of our country, they are always believed to be guilty until they have _established their innocence_, I sent a communication to the Portland Advertiser of October 15, 1839, with my name, charging upon Mr. Henry McIlvaine and Colonel John Stille, Jr. all that I afterwards repeated with more distinctness and solemnity in "The New World," for which I was then writing (and from which I withdrew in consequence of what I then regarded as unfairness toward General Bratish on the part of my coadjutors, Messrs. Park Benjamin and Epes Sargent), and arraigning both McIlvaine and Stille, as conspirators and libellers.