Mr. Judah P. Benjamin, lately Confederate Secretary of State and
revolutionary orator in Richmond, writes to the Times to repeat Mr. Lawley's misrepresentations concerning the treatment of the Federal prisoners in the South, and add one or two of his own. The only new point he makes is that the " photographs which cannot lie" were not taken from the regularly exchanged prisoners at all, but from prisoners exchanged on both aides because their state was so hopeless as to render imprisonment an inhumanity. Unfortunately the evidence now daily published in the Wirz trial in' the United States concerning the state of the prisoners in the Andersonville prison renders this plea utterly worthless. We know that many thousands of the regular prisoners died, from no disease except the diseases caused by cruelty and filth, in the state de- picted by the photographs. Mr. Benjamin repeats the slander
concerning Colonel Dahlgren's asserted designs in the raid on Richmond. He knows perfectly well that the letter put on Dahlgren's body by the Confederates and there found by them was a gross and dutnsy forgery, ill-spelt and wrongly signed, which even in Richmond was universally discredited by all who knew the man and the circumstances. Mr. Benjamin, like Mr. Lawley, forgets cotiVeniently enough why the cartel of exchange was not carried out,—namely, because the Confederate authorities refused to treat negro soldiers as prisoners of war. We can well believe what he tells-us, that Mr. Davis consistently opposed the more cruel policy towards prisoners urged upon him by some of his advisers—for -example, by Mr. Benjamin ?
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