Lest We Forget Ben Butler. 191
everyone to a long breath of relief. Such stinging words, such ter- rible denunciation, put with so much of real eloquence, are rarely heard, and could not but have moved the most stolid auditor."
Brown was censured by the Speaker, and wore it as a badge of honor. He is the only man who ever pierced the rhinosceronian hide of Ben Butler.
The London Saturday Review, of June 14, 1862, said:
The proclamation of General Butler, at New Orleans, has been read in England with a horror which no other event in this deplorable Civil war has created. The attention it has excited in Parliament inadequately represents the general feeling of indignation among us. It is difficult to conceive that a civilized man can have written it, or that civilized man can have been fouud to carry it out. This is not a generation in which men shudder at the ordinary horrors and bru- talities of war. The experience of the last ten years has taught us, as actors, as sufferers and as bystanders, that war is not made of rose water. It is hard to set a limit to the horrors which rough, un- educated men, with their passions strung to the highest point, will commit in the first revelry of success. But such excesses have been usually confined to the first sack of a stormed town, and they have always, among civilized nations, been the result, not of a com- mander's order, but of the ungovernable brute impulses of the men. They have always been checked and disavowed by commanding offi- cers, not only as demoralizing to their troops, but as a blot upon the flags under which they were committed.
In dealing with women, even the sternest commanders have as a rule been gentle. No conqueror but has had to face their unarmed hostility, all the bitterer and bolder that it was secure of impunity. In some cases it may have been firmly though mildly checked, in most instances it has been contempuously passed by. Banishment from the places where their expressions of opinion might be embar- rassing has usually been the extremest measure of rigor to which they have been exposed. Occasionally the animosity of some pecu- liarly brutal officer has hurried him beyond this limit, and he has in- flicted upon women the punishments that are reserved for men. Such an instance was the well-known case of Haynau. But the ex- ecrations of all Europe spurned the perpetrator of that outrage, and rest upon his name even to this day. Yet his offense against humanity was light compared to that of which General Butler has been guilty. He outraged but one victim, and his cruelty left no stain upon her
