Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/99

 under these circumstances? He suppressed every line of my defence and every syllable of my retaliation. He answered me elaborately on every point which admitted of a word of reply; he crowded his paper with letters from third parties on the subject; but my letter, setting myself right with the readers of the Citizen, to whom I had been systematically defamed, and testing the credibility of my defamer, he utterly excluded. The verdict of any gentleman upon that proceeding will, I think, be decisive. The pamphlet had one significant result, however. He refrained from attacking me any more, and several years later repudiated with great warmth a suggestion in the Nation, then edited by Mr. A. M. Sullivan, that he still assailed me whenever an opportunity offered. As far as I am concerned, here the matter might have ended for ever, but Mr. Mitchel had not the grace to blot out from his "Jail Journal" the imputations which I had shown to be untrue and impossible, and they are still read by thousands of our countrymen. No reasonable man will deny, I think, that it was right and necessary to answer them here.

I will close this narrative of my relation with John Mitchel by an extract from a letter of his closest friend and brother-in-law, John Martin. After Mitchel's transportation, and when Martin was himself convicted, he wrote me this generous but substantially accurate estimate of my relation to them and to the party to which we all belonged: "I am proud to acknowledge in you, after glorious Davis, the father of the Irish National party and the chief writer of the party. But for the Nation, which your generous boldness and your fixedness of purpose and your able pen have maintained for the last six years as our standard and rallying point of patriotism, every one of us Confederates—even Mitchel—would have remained in dull, hopeless obscurity."