d them in fair fight, have been commiserated as brave
generals and unfortunate patriots, and efforts are made to place them
within the comities of war.

It is no feeling of personal vengeance, but a sense of the eternal
fitness of things, that makes us rejoice, when criminals who have so
outraged every sentiment of humanity are arrested and arraigned and
awarded due retribution at the bar of their country's justice. There
are crimes against God and human nature which it is treason alike to
God and man not to punish; and such have been the crimes of the
traitors who were banded together in Richmond.

If there be those whose hearts lean to pity, we can show them where
all the pity of their hearts may be better bestowed than in deploring
the woes of assassins. Let them think of the thousands of fathers,
mothers, wives, sisters, whose lives will be forever haunted with
memories of the slow tortures in which their best and bravest were
done to death.

The sufferings of those brave men are ended. Nearly a hundred thousand
are sleeping in those sad nameless graves,--and may their rest be
sweet! "There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be
at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice
of the oppressor." But, O ye who have pity to spare, spare it for the
broken-hearted friends, who, to life's end, will suffer over and over
all that their dear ones endured. Pity the mothers who hear their
sons' faint calls in dreams, who in many a weary night-watch see them
pining and wasting, and yearn with a lifelong, unappeasable yearning
to have been able to soothe those forsaken, lonely death-beds. O man
or woman, if you have pity to spare, spend it not on Lee or
Davis,--spend it on their victims, on the thousands of living hearts
which these men of sin have doomed to an anguish that will end only
with life!

Blessed are the mothers whose sons passed in battle,--a quick, a
painless, a glorious death! Blessed in comparison,--yet we weep for
them. We rise up and give place at sight of their mourning-garments.
We reverence the sanctity of their sorrow. But before this other
sorrow we are dumb in awful silence. We find no words with which to
console such grief. We feel that our peace, our liberties, have been
bought at a fearful price, when we think of the sufferings of our
martyred soldiers. Let us think of them. It was for _us_ they bore
hunger and cold and nakedness. They might have had food and ra