Let no guilty man escape, if it can be avoided. No personal considerations should stand in the way of performing a public duty.

The remark expresses a hard-edged ethic of public service: the enforcement of law and the discharge of official responsibility must not be softened by friendship, party loyalty, or other “personal considerations.” Grant frames justice as a matter of institutional integrity—guilt should not be allowed to slip away through favoritism or reluctance to act. The second sentence broadens the point beyond criminality to governance generally: public duty is owed to the polity, not to private ties. In a Grantian key, it also reflects a soldier’s emphasis on discipline and accountability—an insistence that the legitimacy of authority depends on impartial execution of duty, even when doing so is uncomfortable or politically costly.