ll my father I am ready to die, for I die for
God and my country,"--and, looking up with a triumphant smile, he
passed to the reward of the faithful.

And now, men and brethren, if this story were a single one, it were
worthy to be had in remembrance; but Walter Raymond is not the only
noble-hearted boy or man that has been slowly tortured and starved and
done to death, by the fiendish policy of Jefferson Davis and Robert
Edmund Lee. No,--wherever this simple history shall be read, there
will arise hundreds of men and women who will testify, "Just so died
my son!" "So died my brother!" "So died my husband!" "So died my
father!" The numbers who have died in these lingering tortures are to
be counted, not by hundreds, or even by thousands, but by tens of
thousands.

And is there to be no retribution for a cruelty so vast, so
aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on
whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant,
stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these
hells of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we
punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and brain of
the iniquity?

If General Lee had been determined not to have prisoners starved or
abused, does any one doubt that he could have prevented these things?
Nobody doubts it. His raiment is red with the blood of his helpless
captives. Does any one doubt that Jefferson Davis, living in ease and
luxury in Richmond, knew that men were dying by inches in filth and
squalor and privation in the Libby Prison, within bowshot of his own
door? Nobody doubts it. It was his will, his deliberate policy, thus
to destroy those who fell into his hands. The chief of a so-called
Confederacy, who could calmly consider among his official documents
incendiary plots for the secret destruction of ships, hotels, and
cities full of peaceable people, is a chief well worthy to preside
over such cruelties; but his only just title is President of
Assassins, and the whole civilized world should make common cause
against such a miscreant.

There has been, on both sides of the water, much weak, ill-advised
talk of mercy and magnanimity to be extended to these men, whose
crimes have produced a misery so vast and incalculable. The wretches
who have tortured the weak and the helpless, who have secretly plotted
to supplement, by dastardly schemes of murder and arson, that strength
which faile