e
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 failed 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, there the weary are 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. Oh, 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 lib