The order is given to harass, starve, expose, and torture, say twenty thousand prisoners in our hands, until their bones pierce the skin, and they die idiots in their filth.

If, however, by retaliation he meant that captured Rebels in our hands should be cut off from the pleasant comforts of life which Northerners subservient to the South love to extend to them, then, indeed, we fully agree.

It has had the worst effect on the arrogance of our enemy; but prohibiting it is not, and cannot be called, retaliation.

Let us not be driven from the position of manly calmness and moral dignity; and let us, on the other hand, be stern, so stern that our severity shall impress the prisoners that they are such.

When you speak of our brave officers and soldiers suffering, languishing, pining, dying in Rebel prisons, you touch a chord which vibrates in every patriot bosom.

The Committee, not content with what has been done,--distrustful, perhaps, of the commanding general,--propose that Congress shall instruct the President to enter upon a system of retaliation, where we shall imitate as precisely as…

We are permitted to do all that may become men, but nothing more.

Thanks to the immortal poet who has blasted forever this sickening enormity, and rendered its imitation impossible!

Thanks to that mighty voice which has given new sanction to the mandate of Public Law.

And yet in this terrible case there was retaliation, and the famished victim is revealed as ferociously gnawing the skull of his tormentor.

I do not yield to the Committee, or to any Senator, in ardor or anxiety for their protection.

But, as American citizens, they have an interest that we should do nothing by which our country shall forfeit the great place belonging to it in the vanguard of nations.

It cannot be best for them that our country should do an unworthy thing.

Duties are in proportion to destinies, and from the very heights of our example I argue again that we cannot allow ourselves, under any passing passion or resentment, to accept a policy which history must condemn.

There is not a patriot soldier who would not cry out, “Let me suffer, but save my country!

Nemo repente turpissimus.” A humane and civilized people cannot suddenly become inhuman and uncivilized.

Conscience, heart, soul and body, will all rise against you.

They, too, would cry out, “Let members of Congress do this work, if it is to be done; but do not impose it upon a fellow-man.

It is long since I first raised my voice in this Chamber against the “Barbarism of Slavery,” and I have never ceased to denounce it in season and out of season.

Plainly it is our duty to overcome it, not to imitate it.

Our country must live in the atmosphere of those resolutions, or bear no life worth having.

Although not approving the policy of the Administration, and therefore conscientiously opposed to most of its measures, allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the manly tone and lofty Christian sentiment which pervade the…

But it seems to me that it would be an indelible blot upon our fame, if, in a war with savages, we should imitate their savage cruelties.

I know that retaliation by inflicting death for death may sometimes be necessary in war.

But the torture of prisoners nothing can justify.