The follo^\ing notices of these men, on their return, are caken from the periodicals of the day. A Boston paper says : " More than one-third of these, though never in a battle, were dead or missing before their return." The Editor of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, through which city they passed, says : " We spent some hours in conversatioi! with these poor fellows, endeavoring to un- derstand the meaning of such overwhelming squalor, want, and misery ; for we do not exaggerate when we say, that we never beheld its parallel except at the Irish emigrant sheds in Canada last summer. The condition of these poor creatures was outrageously offensive to every human sense, as well physical as moral.'" Another editor, after their arrival in Boston, remarked : " A more pitiable set of human beings we scarcely ever saw—with unshaven beards, unshorn hair, ragged and dirty clothes of all shapes, fashions, colors, and conditions, pale and sunken faces, and a careless, unambitious saunter. They were truly objects of pity." A Boston editor, after visiting their quarters, exclaims: '-We must confess that the condition of the men struck us with astonishment ; it was wretched beyond conception. Rags and dut were to be seen in abundance. Scarcely a man had a whole pair of pantaloons on, and none a second shirt. Without any offence to the soldiers, we must candidly confess, they are not fit to be seen in the streets of Boston." To form a comprehensive view of the evils of war, and of the tremendous responsibility of those who commence it, we must consider its various and complicated assaults upon human happiness and virtue. The miseries we have inflicted upon ^lexico will form the subject of a future chapter. We will now advert to the retributive justice thus far meted out to the immediate agents by whom those miseries have been inflicted.
The groans of the conquerors themselves are usually drowned in the shouts of victory, and the glare of the illumination fails to reveal the horrors of the battle-field, or the more prolonged agonies of the hospital. Eighty thousand American soldiers, abandoning the comforts of home and the pursuits of ordinary life, have been sub- jected to all the