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In this disposition, I can not conceal from you that I have had some instrumentality of late in the retaliations which have fallen upon certain public characters, and that I find myself placed in a situation not to be able to recede for the present. "I considered myself as compelled to this conduct by reasons, public as well as personal, of the most cogent nature.
The ethics, theology, and statesmanship of this defense are possible only to one bent on making Brown a hero at any cost. The natural result of the Pottawatomie "executions," in which John Brown's complicity was for a time concealed was a series of retaliations on both sides, and a state of affairs far more anarchic than Kansas had known before. This lasted through the summer of 1856.
In some histories it is known as the Palmyra massacre. It is claimed that the Union man turned up alive. If the reports of the numbers of robbers, guerillas and outlaws who were shot on sight in Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere, by both sides in 1864 and 1865, could be gathered up they would furnish retaliations and cruelties enough for these water-cure journals for years.
Whether myrmidons of Justice, specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the gate; whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers, draw a pistol, and shoot me dead: whether suborned boys a numerous band of mercenaries might be engaged to fall upon me in the brewery, and cuff me until I was no more; it was high testimony to my confidence in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I never imagined him accessory to these retaliations; they always came into my mind as the acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.
Of this defect I did not fall to take what poor advantage lay in my power. Wilson's retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a question I never could solve; but, having discovered, he habitually practised the annoyance.
It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used against England and all things English, but I showed by definite figures all up and down England that life and property were far safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and revenge.
Keeping Miss Havisham in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at the possibility of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts, retaliations, or designs.
Hardship, illness, short commons, the need of occasional labor, the heart-breaks over the gold failure, the retaliations of the natives for the cruelties and injustices of the invaders, led to the rapid decline of the city of Isabella. Its foundations may still be visible; at least they were a few years ago; but it is peopled only by ghosts.
A strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one, pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations, repaying what is good in intention with what is evil. Jim, as his father had truly told him, was "not the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see," and in the daily home-life this became apparent to Sarah as it had never been in all the years they had been near neighbors.
There would no longer occur those irritating aggressions, or bloody retaliations, which have too often taken place heretofore, between the black and the white man; and the misfortune of always having the border districts in a state of excitement and alarm, would be avoided, whilst the expense and inconvenience of occasionally sending large parties of military and police, to coerce or punish transgressors that they can rarely meet with, would be altogether dispensed with.