and all are entitled to it. The Confederate Government claims that these persons be delivered within its lines. In this same connection I mention that means have been set on foot to secure to your Government the delivery of the officers and soldiers captured in Texas and who have recently been exchanged.

7. It has been stated by many of the Northern newspaper, with circumstances of great particularity, and nowhere contradicted as far as I have seen, that soldiers and men of the U. S. forces who have been paroled and not exchanged have been sent to your frontiers to fight the Indians now in arms against you. This is in direct conflict with the terms of the cartel. Its language is very plain. It says:

The surplus prisoners not exchanged shall not be permitted to take up arms again, nor to serve as military police or constabulary force in any fort, garrison or fieldwork held by either of the respective parties, nor as guards of prisons, depots or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually performed by soldiers until exchanged under the provisions of this cartel.

It will be seen that this provision of the cartel is absolute and altogether independent of the phraseology of the particular parole given by the captured men and officers.

8. Several boats have recently arrived at Varina under flag of truce, with not one dozen prisoners in either of them. I think in one instance there were but four, and yet there was a boat a few days before and a few days after. I really see no reason for sending these boats so often if there are so few prisoners on hand to be delivered. Why not keep them until a larger number is ready? It puts the authorities here to great and unnecessary trouble. One boat could easily have brought all the prisoners that have been sent by the last four or five. Unless there is some reason to the contrary I would much prefer that the arrivals should be fewer and the cargoes larger.

9. I also bring to your attention the case of pe-combatant citizens of the Confederate States, taken in some instances with almost every possible indignity from their homes and thrown into military prisons. I do not utter it in the way of a threat, but candor demands that I should say that if this course is persisted in the Confederate Government will be compelled by a sense of duty to its own citizens to resort to retaliatory measures. In no one instance have the Confederate authorities sanctioned the arrest of any citizen of any one of the United States found in the exercise of a lawful and peaceful business. If such a case can be found the wrong will be speedily righted.

Such cases not being within the rules of military capture are not therefore the proper subjects of exchange under a cartel. Hundreds of cases have been brought to the attention of the Confederate authorities where parties in pursuit of their ordinary occupations and not bearing arms, and not being in any military organization, have been arrested, dragged from their homes and thrown into prisons, where they remain to this day, even through the U. S. forces which made the arrest have been withdrawn from the neighborhood where it was made. The Confederate Government can in no way, whether by a system of exchanges or otherwise, recognize the right of the United States to invade its territory, arrest, carry off and detain indefinitely its peaceable citizens. In any case where an exchange is proposed if the situation of the parties is the same it will be cheerfully made. The Confederate Government, however, has not arrested your peaceable citizens and has none of that class to offer in exchange for such of the Confederacy as have been taken. To exchange such as we have the right to captures according to the usages of war for our own peace-