Besides, Andrew Johnson never apologized for his appointment of the Military Commission, for his approval of its judgment, or for his signature to the death-warrant. He pardoned Dr. Mudd on the very eve of the Impeachment Trial. And he pardoned the two remaining prisoners just before he went out of office. And he may, therefore, be held to have thus signified his reawakened reverence for constitutional rights as expounded in the Milligan decision. But in no other way did he ever acknowledge that in taking the life of Mary E. Surratt he had done wrong. On the contrary, he defended his action in his answer of 1873, and he justified his denial of the habeas corpus, which the ex-Judge-Advocate had the exquisite affrontery to cast up against him. That a President in his situation could cherish aspirations--or hope--of reelection, based on such a phantom foundation as the whining plea that he would have commuted the unlawful sentence of a woman, hung by his command, to imprisonment for life, had he been permitted to see the petition of five of her judges;--such an imputation can only be made by men mad enough to believe him to have been the accomplice of Booth and Atzerodt. Finally, let us sternly put the question:--What right has Holt to ask us, on the word of himself and his associates, to reject the testimony of Andrew Johnson, who at the best was their accomplice or their tool? He, and his associates, demanded the life of Atzerodt for barely imagining the death of so precious a Vice-President. He, and his associates, hounded the woman to the scaffold, welcoming with delight the stories of spies, informers, personal enemies, false friends, against her, and meeting with contumely and violence the least scrap of testimony in her favor. He suppressed the "Diary." Why may he not have been bad enough to suppress the recommendation? Two of the same band of woman-stranglers kept back from the President the petition for mercy, which wailed out from the lips of the stricken daughter. Why should he not have kept back the timorous suggestion of five officers, who were so soft-hearted as to "discriminate" as to sex? His fate will be--and therein equal and exact justice will be done him--to go down through the ages, stealing away, in the dusk of the evening, from the private entrance of the White House, bearing the fatal missive--the last feeble hope of the trembling widow crushed in his furtive hand. CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION.