But they were willing to do much wrong to gain their end; and the smaller crimes of to-day prepared them for greater ones to-morrow, and still greater ones the day following.

Killing ten men a day on Belle Isle in January, by starvation and hardship, led very easily to killing one hundred men a day in Andersonville, in July, August and September.

Probably at the beginning of the war they would have felt uneasy at slaying one man per day by such means, but as retribution came not, and as their appetite for slaughter grew with feeding, and as their sympathy with human misery atrophied from long suppression, they ventured upon ever widening ranges of destructiveness.

Had the war lasted another year, and they lived, five hundred deaths a day would doubtless have been insufficient to disturb them.
Winder doubtless went about his part of the task of slaughter coolly, leisurely, almost perfunctorily.

His training in the Regular Army was against the likelihood of his displaying zeal in anything.