bands that rise in a district fairly occupied by military force, or in the rear of an army, are universally considered, if captured, brigands, and not prisoners of war. They unite the fourfold character of the spy, the brigand, the assassin, and the rebel, and cannot-indeed, it must be supposed, will not-expect to be treated as a fair enemy of the regular war. They know what a hazardous career they enter upon when they take up arms, and that were the case reversed they would surely not grant the privileges of regular warfare to persons who should thus rise in their rear.

I have thus endeavored to ascertain what may be considered the law of war or fair rules of action toward so-called guerrilla parties. I do not enter upon a consideration of their application to the civil war in which we are engaged, nor of the remarkable claims recently set up by our enemies, demanding us to act according to certain rules which they have signally and officially disregarded toward us. I have simply proposed to myself to find a certain portion of the law of war. The application of the laws and usages of war to wars of insurrection or rebellion is always undefined, and depends upon relaxations of the municipal law, suggested by humanity or necessitated by the numbers engaged in the insurrection. The law of war, as acknowledged between independent belligerent, is at times not allowed to interfere with the municipal law of rebellion, or is allowed to do so only very partially, as was the case in Great Britain during the Stuart rebellion, in the middle of last century; at other times, again, measures are adopted in rebellions, by the victorious party or the legitimate government, more lenient even than the international law of war. Neither of these topics can occupy us here, nor does the letter prefixed to this tract contain the request that I should do so. How far rules which have formed themselves in the course of time between belligerent might be relaxed with safety toward the evil-doers in our civil war, or how far such relaxation or mitigation would be likely to produce a beneficial effect upon an enemy who in committing a great and bewildering wrong seems to have withdrawn himself from the common influences of fairness, sympathy, truth, and logic-how far this ought to be done at the present moment must be decided by the executive power, civil and military, or possibly by the legislative power. It is not for me in this place to make the inquiry. So much is certain, that no army, no society engaged in war, any more than a society at peace, can allow unpunished assassination, robbery, and devastation without the deepest injury to itself and disastrous consequences which might change the very issue of the war.

PITTSBURG, PA., August 6, 1862.

Honorable E. M. STANTON,

Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.:

Can anything be done by the Government to relieve railway empoloyes from draft in the same manner as telegraph officers? The organization of principal lines, all of which have been declared under Government control, will be seriously impaired, if not entirely disorganized, unless the Government will consider employes exempt from draft. Please answer.

THOS. A. SCOTT,

Vice-President Pennsylvania Railroad.