rebuke. For a man of such high and peculiar place his
commercial dabblings and speculative schemes argued most deplorably
against him. There seems to be no doubt that he made personal use of
the public moneys with which he was intrusted; that he secured by
unworthy and illegal means a naval State prize, brought into port by
a Pennsylvanian ship; and that he meditated the fitting up of a
privateer, with intent to secure from the foe such loot on the high
seas as piratical hazard would permit. His house in Philadelphia was
one of the finest that the town possessed; he drove about in a
carriage and four; he entertained with excessive luxury and a large
retinue of servants; he revelled in all sorts of pompous parade.
Such ostentation would have roused adverse comment amid the simple
colonial surroundings of a century ago, even if he had merely been a
citizen of extraordinary wealth. But being an officer intrusted with
the most important dignities in a country both struggling for its
freedom and impoverished as to funds, he now played a part of
exceptional shame and folly.

Naturally his arraignment before the authorities of the State soon
followed. The Council of Pennsylvania tried him, and though their
final verdict was an extremely gentle one, its very mildness of
condemnation proved poison to his truculent pride. Washington, the
commander-in-chief, reprimanded him, but with language of exquisite
lenity. Still, Arnold never forgave the stab that was then so
deservingly yet so pityingly dealt him.

His colossal treason--one of the most monstrous in all the records
of history, soon afterward began its wily work. Under the name of
_Gustavus_ he opened a correspondence with Sir Henry Clinton, an
English officer in command at New York. Sir Henry at once scented
the sort of villainy which would be of vast use to his cause,
however he might loathe and contemn its designer. He instructed his
aide-de-camp, Major John Andre, to send cautious and pseudonymic
replies. In his letters Arnold showed the burning sense of wrong
from which he believed himself (and with a certain amount of
justice) to be suffering. He had, when all is told, received harsh
treatment from his country, considering how well he had served it in
the past. Even Irving, that most dispassionate of historians, has
called the action of the court-martial just mentioned an
"extraordinary measure to prepossess the public mind against him."
Beyond doubt, too, he had b