The London Times commented most favorably on this order, and its American correspondent said of it and of the conduct of our troops:
"The greatest surprise has been expressed to me by officers from the Austrian, Prussian and English armies, each of which have representatives here, that volunteer troops, provoked by nearly twenty-seven months of unparalleled ruthlessness and wantonness, of which their country has been the scene, should be under such control, and should be willing to act in harmony with the long suffering and forbearance of President Davis and General Lee."
To show how faithfully that order was carried out, the same writer tells how he saw, with his own eyes, General Lee and a surgeon of his command repairing a farmer's fence that had been damaged by the army. Indeed, we might rest our whole case on the impartial judgment of a distinguished foreigner, who, writing in 1864, drew this vivid picture and striking contrast between the way the war was conducted on our part and on that of the Federals.
He says:
"This contest has been signalized by the exhibition of some of the best and some of the worst qualities that war has ever brought out. It has produced a recklessness of human life, a contempt of principles, a disregard of engagements, * * the headlong adoption of the most lawless measures, the public faith scandalously violated, both towards friends and enemies; the liberty of the citizen at the hands of arbitrary power; the liberty of the press abolished; the suspension df the habeas corpus act; illegal imprisonments; midnight arrests; punishments inflicted without trial; the courts of law controlled by satellites of government; elections carried on under military supervision; a ruffianism, both of word and action, eating deep into the country* * *; the must brutal inhumanity in the conduct of the war itself; outrages upon the defenceless, upon women, children and prisoners; plunder, rapine, devastation, murder—all the old horrors of barbarous warfare which Europe is beginning to be ashamed of, and new refinements of cruelty thereto added, by way of illustrating the advance of knowledge."
He further says:
