The reports made to the War Department, during the war, show the total loss to have been 280,420 men--the very sight of which figures makes the heart sink in agony and sicken over the thought, and yet there is no escaping their terrible reality. To get at the additional sacrifice, the proposition may be stated thus: If in a war lasting forty-seven months, with 2,688,523 men in service (of whom 1,500,000 it is estimated were in battles), the sacrifice of life amounted to 280,420 men, what would have been the sacrifice had the war lasted only three months, with 75,000 men in service? The answer to this problem is 499 lives. Now take this number from the former, and you have as the additional number 279,921 lives--the loss of which is as fairly attributable to the Democratic party as though it had by sentence condemned, and by its own power had executed, every one of these men. The remains of thousands and tens of thousands who died in the service never were gathered, but to-day lie in Southern swamps, scattered over Southern cotton-fields, or at the bottom of the deep, blue sea, "unknown, unhonored, and unwept;" but the remains of other thousands and tens of thousands have been gathered, and now lie in National cemeteries at Arlington Heights, at Gettysburg, at Antietam, at Beverly, and at many other places throughout the length and breadth of our land. The above calculations show--and figures never lie when correctly placed--that if upon ninety-five out of every one hundred headstones erected to the memory of these departed heroes in the National and private cemeteries of our country were written the words, _Died by the hands of the Democratic party_, the record would be as true as anything now written upon those headstones. We are fully aware of the terrible character of this indictment. We know already how many thousands will hold up their hands in holy horror and exclaim, Oh, this cannot be so! These are not the words of a historian, but of a politician, who allows his prejudices to get the better of his reason! But hold, my friend, hold, and think twice before you condemn once. Are they not words of truth and soberness? Examine each proposition just as carefully as you would examine one of Euclid's problems (for this is just what we have tried to do), and see if it is possible to reach any other conclusion. Republican though we certainly are, yet, in examining these questions as a historian, we have tried to divest our mind of every particle of political prejudice, and though the results of our researches and calculations are as astounding, as terrible, as sickening-of-heart to us as they can possibly be to any one of our readers, yet the figures would show no other, and we have had to accept them as veritable.