It has been so throughout the contest;
and the same argument has been held by soldiers and by non-soldiers -
by women and by men.
"Grant that they are rebels," I have
answered. "But when rebels fight they cannot be expected to be more
scrupulous in their mode of doing so than their enemies who are not
rebels." The whole population of the North has from the beginning
of this war considered themselves entitled to all the privileges of
belligerents; but have called their enemies Goths and Vandals for
even claiming those privileges for themselves. The same feeling was
at the bottom of their animosity against England. Because the South
was in rebellion, England should have consented to allow the North
to assume all the rights of a belligerent, and should have denied
all those rights to the South! Nobody has seemed to understand that
any privilege which a belligerent can claim must depend on the very
fact of his being in encounter with some other party having the same
privilege. Our press has animadverted very strongly on the States
government for the apparent untruthfulness of their arguments on
this matter; but I profess that I believe that Mr. Seward and his
colleagues - and not they only but the whole nation - have so
thoroughly deceived themselves on this subject, have so talked and
speechified themselves into a misunderstanding of the matter, that
they have taught themselves to think that the men of the South could
be entitled to no consideration from any quarter.
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