or otherwise, as the army could when in straits for provisions.  The General also explained how every effort had always been made by the Confederates to do away with the necessity of retaining prisoners by offering every facility for exchange, till at last, when all exchange was refused, they found themselves with 30,000 prisoners for whom they were quite unable to do as much as they wished in the way of food.  He stated, furthermore, that many of their hardships arose from the necessity of constantly changing the prisons to prevent recapture.  With the management of the prisons he assured me he had no more to do than I had, and did not even know that Wirz was in charge of Andersonville prison (at least, I think he asserted this) till after the war was over.  I could quite sympathise with him in his feeling of pain under which his generous nature evidently suffered that the authorities at Washington should have included him and others similarly circumstanced in this charge of cruelty at the time that letters written by himself (General Lee), taken in Richmond when captured, complaining that the troops in his army had actually been for days together on several occasions without an ounce of meat, were in possession of the military authorities.

“When discussing the state of feeling in England with regard to the war, he assured me that it had all along given him the greatest pleasure to feel that the Southern cause had the sympathies of so many in the ‘old country,’ to which he looked as a second home; but, in answer to my questions, he replied that he had never expected us to give them material aid, and added that he thought all governments were right in studying only the interests of their own people and in not going to war for an ‘idea’ when they had no distinct cause of quarrel.

“On the subject of slavery, he assured me that he had always been in favour of the emancipation of the negroes, and that in Virginia the feeling had been strongly inclining in the same direction, till the ill-judged enthusiasm (amounting to rancour) of the abolitionists in the North had turned the Southern tide of feeling in the other direction.  In Virginia, about thirty years ago, an ordinance for the emancipation of the slaves had been rejected by only a small majority, and every one fully expected at the next convention it would have been carried, but for the above cause.  He went on to say that there was scarcely a Virginian now who was not glad that the subject had been definitely settled, though nearly all regretted that they had not been wise enough to do it themselves the first year of the war.  Allusion was made by him to a conversation he had with a distinguished countryman of mine.  He had been visiting a large slave plantation (Shirley) on the James River.  The Englishman had told him that the working population were better cared for there than in any country he had ever visited, but that he must never expect an approval of the institution