lulled by the chant of the serene mother-forest.

Hush! A light step, like a blown leaf: the loose wooden latch rises at
the touch of a familiar hand; familiar feet, that have trodden every
inch of that poor log floor, lead the way; and then all at once, like
a bundle of Chinese crackers, intermingled with shrieks and groans and
deep, vehement curses, the rapid reports of pistols fill the chambers.
The beds, the floors, the walls, the doors are splashed with blood,
and the chambers are cumbered with dead and dying men in dreadful
agony. Happy those who passed quietly from the sweet sleep of Nature
to the deeper sleep of death! Of thirty young men in the flush of
youth, not one escaped. Six Federal scouts had threaded their way
since sunset from the Federal lines to do this horrible work. Oh,
Captain Jack, swart warrior of the Modocs! must we hang you for
defending your lava-bed home in your own treacherous native way, when
we, to preserve an arbitrary political relation, murder sleeping men
in their beds?

Let me close with an incident of that great game of war in which the
watershed of the Ohio was the gambler's last stake.

The Confederacy was a failure in '62, held together by external
pressure of hostile armies. It converted civil office into bomb-proofs
for the unworthy by exempting State and Federal officials; it
discouraged agriculture by levying on the corn and bacon of the small
farmers, while the cotton and sugar of the rich planter were jealously
protected; it discouraged enlistment by exempting from military
service every man who owned twenty negroes, one hundred head of
cattle, five hundred sheep--in brief, all who could afford to serve;
it discouraged trade by monopolies and tariffs. But for the ubiquitous
Jew it would have died in 1862-'63, as a man dies from stagnation of
the blood. It was the rich man's war and the poor man's fight.

This suicidal policy had its effect. Cut off from all markets, the
farmer planted only for family use. At the close of the war the people
of Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas had to be fed by the government.
The farmers in 1864 refused to feed the Southern army. Seventy
thousand men deserted east of the Mississippi between October 1, 1864,
and February 3, 1865. They were not recalled: the government could not
feed them. The Confederacy was starved out by its own people--rather
by its own hideous misgovernment, for the people were loyal to the
cause.

One fact was app