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Rh on the treatment of prisoners by the South in the late war," else it might have assumed a different form, and perhaps have been more "judicial." But the slanders against the South, which had gone so long unanswered that they had "run riot over both facts and probabilities," were repeated on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. Blaine, who charged that "Mr. Davis was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily and wilfullywillfully [sic], of the gigantic murder and crime at Andersonville." We felt called on to defend our Government from these charges, and our argument was not that there were no "abuses" in Southern prisons—that there was no evidence of cruelty to prisoners on the part of individuals, and by no means that there were not great sufferings and fearful mortality among the Federal prisoners at the South; but we pursued a line of argument clearly indicated in the following brief summing up, with which we closed our discussion, and which, we respectfully submit, The Nation might have given to its readers, if it had been itself disposed to be "judicial" in its treatment of this question. We closed our discussion as follows:

We think that we have established the following points:

1. The laws of the Confederate Congress, the orders of the War Department, the regulations of the Surgeon-General, the action of our Generals in the field, and the orders of those who had the immediate charge of the prisoners, all provided that prisoners in the hands of the Confederates should be kindly treated, supplied with the same rations which our soldiers had, and cared for when sick in hospitals placed on precisely the same footing as the hospitals for Confederate soldiers.

2. If these regulations were violated in individual instances, and if subordinates were sometimes cruel to prisoners, it was without the knowledge or consent of the Confederate Government, which always took prompt action on any case reported to them.

3. If the prisoners failed to get their full rations, and had those of inferior quality, the Confederate soldiers suffered in precisely the same way, and to the same extent, and it resulted from that system of warfare adopted by the Federal authorities, which carried desolation and ruin to every part of the South they could reach, and which in starving the Confederates into submission brought the same evils upon their own men in Southern prisons.

4. The mortality in Southern prisons (fearfully large, although over three per cent. less than the mortality in Northern prisons), resulted from causes beyond the control of our authorities—from epidemics, &c., which might have been avoided, or greatly mitigated, had not the Federal Government declared medicines "contraband of war"—refused the proposition of Judge Ould, that each Government should send its own surgeons with medicines, hospital stores, &c.,