"He closed his door, his ears, and his heart against every appeal for mercy in her behalf, and hurried this hapless woman almost unshrived to the gallows." What a picture is this! The minion of Stanton, the colleague of Bingham, the tutor of Weichman, the tutor of Lloyd, the procurer of the death-warrant, weeping over the empty grave in the Arsenal, which, after his master's relentless watch was over, had at length given up its dead! Here we are forced to stop. After such an exhibition, we can linger no longer over this miserable scramble to shirk responsibility. Its only consequence of historic importance, after all, is the light it casts upon the memory of the sacrificial victim. Out of the cloud of mutual vituperation, which covers the men who, among them, somehow, compassed her slaughter, her innocence rises clearer and clearer, like the images of retribution from the foul fumes of the witches' cauldron. Her vindication must be held to be final, complete and unassailable, when John A. Bingham is anxious to acquaint the country that he drafted a petition to save her life; when J. Holt pretends to weep for her; when Andrew Johnson is forced, by the inexorable pressure of events, to confess that when he signed her death-warrant he knew not what he did. * * * * * As we let fall the curtain at the close of this dark and shameful tragedy, let us endeavor to anticipate the verdict of history. The execution of Mary E. Surratt is the foulest blot on the history of the United States of America. It was a violation of the most sacred provisions of that Constitution, whose enforcement was the vaunted purpose of the War. It was a violation of the fundamental forms and principles of criminal jurisprudence, centuries older than the Constitution. It was a violation of that even-handed justice, which is said to rule in the armies of Heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. It was a violation of those chivalrous impulses which spring unbidden to the manly breast in the presence of woman. It was a violation of the benign precepts of Jesus, which enjoin tenderness to the fatherless and the widow. It was a violation of the magnanimity of the brave soldier, which scorns to wound the weak, the fallen and the helpless. It was a violation of even the common instincts of fairness, which subsist, as a matter of course, between man and man. It was unconstitutional. It was illegal. It was unjust. It was inhumane. It was unholy. It was pusillanimous. It was mean. And it was each and all of these in the highest or lowest degree. It resembles the acts of savages, and not the deeds of civilized men.