The censure of Mr. Benjamin was based upon the assumption that he was responsible for reverses, which a more skillful and attentive management would have avoided. Yet the facts establish the declaration of Mr. Davis that those reverses were unavoidable. They, indeed, simply foreshadowed the fact, which the country soon after realized, of the immense disadvantage of the Confederate forces in all cases where the naval facilities of the enemy could be made available. Can it be successfully maintained that another in the place of Mr. Benjamin would have prevented the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, of Roanoke Island, of Newbern, of Memphis, of Island No. 10, and of New Orleans? General Randolph, the successor of Mr. Benjamin, is universally conceded to have made a competent secretary of war during his brief term; yet will it be maintained that had General Randolph, instead of Mr. Benjamin, been the successor of Mr. Walker, that all, or any of those disasters would have been prevented? Mr. Benjamin can hardly be deemed less fortunate than his successors. Messrs. Randolph and Breckinridge were, perhaps, fortunate in the brief period of their responsibility, or they, too, might have shared the public censure so freely lavished upon Messrs. Walker, Benjamin, and Seddon. Perhaps no more thankless position was ever assumed by an official than the management of the War Department of the Confederate States. The difficult problem propounded by Themistocles--"to make a small state a great one"--was of easy solution, compared to that presented the luckless incumbent of an office, in which the abundance of responsibilities and embarrassments was commensurate only with the poverty of resources with which to meet them. To create an army from a population of between five and six millions, able to successfully cope with an adversary supported by a home population of twenty-five millions, aided by the inexhaustible reserves of Europe; with blockaded ports, a newly-organized Government, and a country of limited manufacturing means; to match in the material of war the wealthiest and most productive nation in the world; to maintain the strength and efficiency of an army decimated by its own unnumbered victories, and from a population depleted by successive conscriptions, was the encouraging task devolving upon President Davis and his Secretary of War. It is, at least, reasonable to doubt whether even the genius of Napoleon, or of Carnot, was ever summoned to such an enterprise.