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 master--the country and the country's attorneys, and would hold the former and not the latter accountant. I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. And though I consented to no individual animosities--for individuals in such transactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they work in, like the dyer's hand--I could not so easily absolve the impersonal master. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the community against us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, I had participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoretically impersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts.