rhaps overthrown the administration and defeated the
policy of the government. To exchange would pretty surely have prolonged
the war, and might have resulted in permanent disunion.

As to the right or wrong of the refusal to exchange, it is hardly
relevant to insist that the triumph of the South would have perpetuated
slavery. Lincoln's Proclamation, January 1, 1863, did not touch slavery
in the Border States. And from the southern nation, denuded of slaves by
their escape to the North and confronted by the growing anti-slavery
sentiment of the civilized world, the "peculiar institution" would soon
have died out.

Need we attempt, as is often done, to justify our government's attitude
in this matter by affirming that the nation was in a life-and-death
struggle for its very existence? Did that existence depend upon its
territorial limits? Would it have gone to pieces if the victorious North
had relinquished its hold on the defeated South? Had a boundary line
been drawn half-way across the continent, separating the twenty-three
loyal States from the eleven seceding, the twenty-two millions of the
North from the nine or ten millions of the South, would it not have
remained a mighty nation with no cause for further disunion, and able as
the war had shown to place in the field more than two million fighting
men?

Is it not equally unnecessary to urge, as if it were a valid excuse for
our government's refusal to exchange, that between the two nations there
would have been frequent if not perpetual hostilities? Why so, any more
than between the United States and Canada, where for fifty (it is now a
hundred) years, along a boundary line of thirty-eight hundred miles,
there had been unbroken peace and no fort nor warship?

Let us not raise the question whether Lincoln made a colossal blunder
when he renounced his favorite doctrine so emphatically set forth in his
Congressional speech (page 47). The die was cast when Sumter was fired
on. The question which confronted him in 1863-64--What to do with the
perishing Union prisoners?--was simply one of military necessity.

According to the ethics of war was he not fully justified in sacrificing
us rather than imperiling the great cause which he had at heart?

Are we, then, to blame President Davis, or the Confederate Commissioner
Robert Ould, or Gen. John H. Winder, Superintendent of Military Prisons,
for allowing the Federal prisoners to starve and freeze and die by
thousands?