his master and had the right to use his name and seal, was the first to speak.  He once more explained in detail that never, on his own authority, would he have suppressed the complaint which the horse-dealer had lodged in court against his cousin the Squire, had it not been for the fact that, misled by false statements, he had believed it an absolutely unfounded and worthless piece of mischief-making.  After this he passed on to consider the present state of affairs.  He remarked that by neither divine nor human laws had the horse-dealer been warranted in wreaking such horrible vengeance as he had allowed himself to take for this mistake.  The Chamberlain then proceeded to describe the glory that would fall upon the damnable head of the latter if they should negotiate with him as with a recognized military power, and the ignominy which would thereby be reflected upon the sacred person of the Elector seemed to him so intolerable that, carried away by the fire of his eloquence, he declared he would rather let worst come to worst, see the judgment of the mad rebel carried out and his cousin, the Squire, led off to Kohlhaasenbrueck to fatten the black horses, than know that the proposition made by Dr. Luther had been accepted.

The Lord High Chancellor of the Tribunal of Justice, Count Wrede, turning half way round toward him, expressed regret that the Chamberlain had not, in the first instance, been inspired with such tender solicitude for the reputation of the sovereign as he was displaying in the solution of this undoubtedly delicate affair.  He represented to the Elector his hesitation about employing the power of the state to carry out a manifestly unjust measure.  He remarked, with a significant allusion to the great numbers which the horse-dealer was continually recruiting in the country, that the thread of the crime threatened in this way to be spun out indefinitely, and declared that the only way to sunder it and extricate the government happily from that ugly quarrel was to act with plain honesty and to make good, directly and without respect of person, the mistake which they had been guilty of committing.

Prince Christiern of Meissen, when asked by the Elector to express his opinion, turned deferentially toward the Grand Chancellor and declared that the latter’s way of thinking naturally inspired in him the greatest respect, but, in wishing to aid Kohlhaas to secure justice, the Chancellor failed to consider that he was wronging Wittenberg, Leipzig, and the entire country that had been injured by him, in depriving them of their just claim for indemnity or at least for punishment of the culprit.  The order of the state was so disturbed in its relation to this man that it would be difficult to set it right by an axiom taken from the science of law.  Therefore, in accord with the opinion of the Chamberlain, he was in favor of employing the means appointed for such cases—­that is to say, there should be gathered a force large