until about two o'clock, when he suddenly roused
himself, stretched out his hand, and, drawing to him his dearest friend
among those around him, said, in a strong, clear voice,--

"I am going to die. Go tell 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 jailors 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 hav