And here I may notice your extraordinary statement that I have retained women and children in positions exposed to your fire, only to say that no control whatever has been exercised over them, and I cannot suppose that you really believed the mass of the non-combatant population of Charleston had abandoned the city. Your only hand batteries are under the guns of your war vessels. The nearest one is about five miles distant, and fires over our intermediate batteries into the city, from which your fire has never been returned. Those batteries you know must be taken, silenced, or turend before you can hope to occupy and possess the site of this city and its habor. The fire has been such as you very well know could not lessen by one hour the duration of this war or produce and material military result. Under the foregoing statement of facts I cannot but regard the desultory firing on this city, which you dignify by the name of bombardement, from its commenecement to this hour, as unchristian, inhuman, and utterly indefensible by any law, human or divine.

To this city, thus circumstanced, the prisoners of war referred to in my letter of the 13th instant have been for safe-keeping. You assert this to be an act of indefensible cruelty, unknown to honorable warfare. If it were so, it would ill become any officer of your Government to raise the question, for it would fall so immeasurably short of the innumerable crimes perpetrated by your armies, with the approval and sanction of your Government, that in comparison with them it would seem like the tenderest care that a mother could bestow on a child. Your Government has retained at the head of one of its armies a general whose conduct in this war has acquired from his such notorious infamy that his name is a by-word and reproach in very land where the events of the war are known; and at the head of another of its armies a general who publishes to the world and instructs his officers that for the loyal citizens of the Southern Confederacy "death is mercy"; "the quicker he or she is disposed of the better"; that "Satan and the rebellions saints of heaven were allowed a continuance of existence in hell merely to swel their just punishment", and that "to such as would rebel against a Government so mind and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal wqould not be unjust". The officers of such a Government are precluded from raising any question as to the observance or non-observance of the rules of honorabel warfare. But it is not true that the prisoners of war now in this city are treated with any cruelty. They are in a large city, not besieged, but partially blockaded by land and naval batteries, from five to ten miles distant. They are provided with commodious and comfortable quarters, remote from all military and naval works, or any other object on which you may legitmately fire, and they are treated with all the consideration due to prisoners of war. They are surrounded by citizens of all classes and conditions, and it cannot be regarded as an act of cruelty to place them in the immediate neighborhood of the houses occupied by our wives and children. I desire, and have so directed, that they be treated with all the consideration and kindness due their rank and condition, and I will greatly deplore any necessity you may force on me to direct any change in that course of treatment. You regard that treatment as justifying you in asking your Government to place in your custody an equal number of prisoners of like grade, to be kept by you in positions exposed to the fire of my guns. We direct our fire only on your batteries, shipping, and troops. If you will direct your guns only on the works that you distinctly specify as the objects of your five, or on any object in which an honorable foe may legitimately fire, the prisoners of war and their