that ended in defeat, and he replies thus:  “If, then, the results had been foreknown to all—­not even then should the Commonwealth have abandoned her design, if she had any regard for glory, or ancestry, or futurity.  As it is, she appears to have failed in her enterprise, a thing to which all mankind are liable, if the Deity so wills it.”  And he asks the Athenians:  “Why, had we resigned without a struggle that which our ancestors encountered every danger to win, who would not have spit upon you?” And he asks them further to consider strangers, visiting their City, sunk in such degradation, “especially when in former times our country had never preferred an ignominious security to the battle for honour.”  And he rises from the thought to this proud boast:  “None could at any period of time persuade the Commonwealth to attach herself in secure subjection to the powerful and unjust; through every age has she persevered in a perilous struggle for precedency and honour and glory.”  And he tells them, appealing to the memory of Themistocles, how they honoured most their ancestors who acted in such a spirit:  “Yes; the Athenians of that day looked not for an orator or a general, who might help them to a pleasant servitude:  they scorned to live if it could not be with freedom.”  And he pays them, his listeners, a tribute:  “What I declare is, that such principles are your own; I show that before my time such was the spirit of the Commonwealth.”  From one eloquent height to another he proceeds, till, challenging AEschines for arraigning him, thus counselling the people, he rises to this great level:  “But, never, never can you have done wrong, O Athenians, in undertaking the battle for the freedom and safety of all:  I swear it by your forefathers—­those that met the peril at Marathon, those that took the field at Plataea, those in the sea-fight at Salamis, and those at Artimesium, and many other brave men who repose in the public monuments, all of whom alike, as being worthy of the same honour, the country buried, AEschines, not only the successful and victorious.”  We did not need this fine eloquence to assure us of the greatness of our O’Neills and our Tones, our O’Donnells and our Mitchels, but it so quickens the spirit and warms the blood to read it, it so touches—­by the admiration won from ancient and modern times—­an enduring principle of the human heart—­the capacity to appreciate a great deed and rise over every physical defeat—­that we know in the persistence of the spirit we shall come to a veritable triumph.  Yes; and in such light we turn to read what Ruskin called the greatest inscription ever written, that which Herodotus tells us was raised over the Spartans, who fell at Thermopylae, and which Mitchel’s biographer quotes as most fitting to epitomise Mitchel’s life:  “Stranger, tell thou the Lacedemonians that we are lying here, having obeyed their words.”  And the biographer of Mitchel is right in holding that he who reads into the significance of these brave lines, reads a message not of defeat but of victory.