There was no doubt an element, perhaps a large element of the population of the Southern States, that was in full sympathy with this policy; but such a policy could only have been abhorrent to the honorable foe who bravely confronted us on the field of conflict. It was the stay-at-home-and-fight element that sanctioned these atrocities. War is cruel when conducted on the strictest rules of civilized warfare. War is destructive; it is harsh and unrelenting. Foeman must meet foeman with his steel. It is a game in which human life is always the price of success and the cost of failure. The enemy must be met and overcome; his resources must be reached and cut off if it can be done, thus starving him into submission, as a more humane way of getting the victory over him than by taking his life. But amongst civilized people no enemy is to be deprived of life but the armed and active foe in the field, in honorable and open combat, except for crime. The lives of women, children, prisoners of war, and of non-combatants generally, must be held sacred. Thus we see how much the horrors of war have been mitigated by the more enlightened sentiments and Christian morality of the world's present state of civilization. When these shall have done their perfect work, wars will cease. The time will yet come when men shall learn war no more. May God hasten the day. In charging Jefferson Davis, and those associated with him in the conduct of the war with an utter disregard of the laws of war, and of being guilty of atrocities that are only matched in savage life, I wish again to make a distinct disclaimer in behalf of those who fought, and of those who conducted his operations in the field. Whilst I abhor their construction of the Constitution and theory of the union of the States as destructive of the hopes of liberty and of free government, tending continually to disintegration, and making the idea of a nation an impossibility, I admire and honor the courage and bravery with which they maintained their theory, and accord to them the honor, as well as the courage of true soldiers.