I have taken no pleasure in this recital of injuries, insults, inhumanity, and breach of faith. The truth of history demands that the facts shall be told on both sides calmly and with impartiality. The world, which has heard so much of one side, should hear the other too; and posterity, at whose bar we shall all stand for this four years' work, should have every opportunity afforded for a righteous verdict. And there are other ways in which the truth plainly told may do good. People will be enabled, looking at these details, to arrive at a just estimate of what war may become, even among Christian people, and shudder to invoke its horrors lightly, and may teach their children so. How many of us knew in the spring of 1861 what was about to break out among us--what wide-spread ruin, what raging passions, what furies of hell, which once evoked will not down at our bidding? Quiet men, who were familiar with the pages of European history and knew what Christian armies had done again and again in the fairest and most civilized portion of her empires, these came gravely from their studies with words of warning to the gay throngs of young people who were cheering each other on to the impending strife. But these were the old fogies of that day--cold-blooded--unpatriotic--who did not love the South. What a short and brilliant programme was laid down! The girls made their silken banners, and the boys marched proudly off to glorious victory; England and France would see fair play; and this dear and sunny South was to spring at once upward and onward in a career of glory. One of the most influential journals in the South--one of the soberest--dealing lightly and easily with the great issues of the war; settling at a word the boundary lines of the new Southern republic, and dotting what were to be our frontier States with a chain of forts; establishing the new war office, and the standing army, henceforth to be a necessary feature, grew enthusiastic over the splendid resource thus to be afforded to our "aristocratic young men of family and fortune." The army was to be especially for the _gentlemen_ of the South. Alas! and alas! Now, torn and bleeding and broken-hearted, humiliated, stripped, crushed, disfranchised, and helpless, we may look back and learn a lesson. It may be well, too, if public attention can be directed by such narratives to an investigation of the laws of war, and some inquiry be suggested as to the necessity of their being revised and mitigated. And it can not but a have a beneficial effect that even victorious military heroes shall be made amenable to public opinion for the manner in which they have wielded the great powers intrusted to them, and find, in some cases, their fresh-plucked laurels withering in their grasp.